Raphael by R. A. MacAvoy Page B

back on the subject of guilt.) Even Saara had tried to purloin his sins from him. Surely a woman who looked like that might have some of her own…
    It seemed the earth was inhabited by posturing heros, with Gaspare of San Gabriele as the only poor dolt among them. Fit for nothing but to be saved from himself. It couldn’t be borne!
    Well, he WOULDN’T bear it, he decided with a few redheaded curses. He rose to his full height (in three years he had grown prodigiously) and strode off toward the sunlight, seeking his wayward horse.
    Lombardy in high summer was a green cathedral, with its constant murmur of clean waters and its odor of shadowy frankincense. On a round hill between spires of rock flourished the wild garden of Saara: a meadow of heavy grass, cut by interlacing streams, dotted with the early blue aster, and wound about with the sprawling late red rose. Not far from the lawn, in the shade of the pines below, she had a little house of sod, built after the manner of her northern people, to which she withdrew only to sleep.
    Here also grew rosemary and comfrey, eyebright, and mullein, the vervain which makes the wild cats drunk in the springtime, and orris, for sweetening clothes and hair. Above the meadow, among the feathered birches which crested the dome of the hill, was a stand of hazel also: all plants with uses for the leech, witch, or wise woman.
    Saara was all three of these, and on her garden no frost came,
    though through the winter the high peaks on either side of her hill were painted white.
    Under the last Ml moon of summer she sat, on the round dome of the hill, where the scattered birch striped the darkness with silver, and the fingers of the trees twisted moonlight into chains. She sat tailor fashion, wearing nothing but Gaspare’s linen shirt, her brown hair cropped halfway down her neck. Her face, splashed with light and shadow, was not that of a girl.
    There is a spell almost all witches know, though some chant it and some read it from books and still others play it through the length of a staff, or scratch it out with the blood of a cock. It is not a complicated spell, only very dangerous, and for that reason it is often learned and rarely used.
    Saara, in her long life, had never sung this spell before. When she had lost her lovers, she had refrained. When her children died, even then she had been wise, for she knew the gate of death had its purpose.
    But now she, too, had her purpose—a purpose beyond loss or loneliness. Her purpose was rescue.
    Through no other means had she been able to find Raphael. He was neither in the wind nor in the voice of the water, and he didn’t hear her call—or he could not answer. She hadn’t really expected to find him so easily, for she remembered that spinning disorientation in the air and the strange bare peak with a window. That was the place she must find again. For that she needed help.
    So the greatest witch in the Italies sat with her hands folded in her lap and her legs bare to the wind as she sang up the dead.
    It began with a wail and rose into a chant of four ascending notes, the last of which she held clear and unshaken until her breath failed her. She sang the line again. And again.
    There was no expression to be seen on Saara’s face, had there been any to see on that dome of trembling birch. She had no feeling in her once the song had begun. And the moon put a severe light upon her features, emphasizing their odd Asiatic cast and draining all color. She appeared neither girl nor young woman under that stained white globe. In fact, there was nothing particularly feminine about the figure on the dry earth. Nothing particularly human. She might have been a peak of rock among those of the Alps nearby, eternally white, cloaked with loud, grieving winds.
    The same four notes, building like stairs upon one another. Carving a black path into blackness. They droned on while the soiled moon rolled from the slopes of the