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"And THAT'S the advice of Damiano, the intrusive spirit. Take it or leave it," he concluded, less
passionately.
Raphael couldn't help casting a furtive eye over the dark garden, even though he knew Damiano's
outburst had made no sound another could hear. "But Rashiid is my master," he answered. "Under the
laws of man. And Djoura she is freed and gone from here."
The ghost allowed his smoky wings to sink back again, until they obscured his outline, but a pair of
quick Italian' eyes darted from the wall to his friends wan face. "Laws of man," he echoed, rumbling in his
deep, mumbling, Pied-montese accent. "Hah, for the laws of man!" A complex, obscure gesture
accompanied the words.
"Raphael, you know me for a witch, don't you?"
The blond's eyes (not quick; not Italian) deepened in memory. "I know what you were in life, my dear
friend."
Damiano lifted one eyebrow and one wing, in unconscious imitation of his teacher. "Well, Seraph,
alive or dead, I'm about to work a great magic for you. To help alleviate this problem."
Raphael managed a smile. He let his back slide down the smooth wall until he was sitting on the turf.
"Which problem, Darni? That of my freedom, or of my& "
"They are linked," the ghost replied shortly. With a face so full of gravity it wore a scowl, he floated
back from Raphael.
Great dusky wings stood out sideways, as stiff as heraldry. Two rather large hands were lifted in front
of Damiano's breast. He raised his flashing eyes to the heavens. "Habera Corpus!" he intoned. "Ades,
Barbara, Ades!"
His shadowy hand was lit suddenly and only for a moment. The air smelled of lightning.
"Witness," cried Damiano, pointing inexplicably at the top of the garden wall. "Witness my power."
Raphael looked, saw nothing, and gazed confusedly once more at the spirit.
Who completed the ruination of the effect by winking.
But at a sound Raphael's head turned again to the wall, just in time to see Djoura, bareheaded but
draped in her numerous garb, put one foot and then the other over the top and drop to the dry garden
earth beside him.
Raphael's welcoming embrace was oddly hesitant and awkward, for the juxtaposition of what he had
imagined with what he had never dared made him shy. But the black woman was too full of her own
mission to notice.
"Don't ask questions," Djoura hissed into his ear. "I have walked all the way across Andalusia to
rescue you, so you just follow me."
With a glance back toward the spot where he had last seen Damiano and another at the figure of the
boy who lay snoring at the bolted garden gate, Raphael did follow Djoura, up and over the garden wall.
Now I am a renegade, he thought, crouching in the obscurity of the roadside, looking back at the pale
height of clay he had just scaled. Just like Lucifer: a renegade.
Not quite like Lucifer, he qualified, as a firm dark handhold pulled him on. Lucifer would never let
anyone lead him by the hand. The snores of Ali the doorkeeper faded in his ears.
For five minutes he scuttled after his liberator, along alleyways he did not recognize, passing squares
where even now in the second hour of morning they encountered people who had risen already for the
next day as well as people who had not yet been to bed.
He was prodded to walk upright. He was made to stroll. Djoura, stepping meekly behind him,
twisted her bony knuckle into the small of his back to induce him to behave. "You are free, Pinkie! Walk
like a free man!"
Raphael was walking the only way he knew to walk. On impulse he turned on his heel and came
round beside the woman. He laid one arm over her shoulders.
"If I am free, then this is how I please to walk," he replied reasonably. "And if I were wholly free, I
would not walk at all, because I need so much to speak with you, my dear Djoura."
The Berber wiggled out of touch. "None of that! What are you thinking, man? You'll have us both
pilloried, holding on to me in public."
Raphael smiled ruefully, feeling not very free at all. But he trotted along, talking over his shoulder,
while Djoura drove him from behind.
"Did the magic pull you from your Moroccan home, Djoura? Or were you still on the sea when the
call came?" Djoura puzzled at his phrasing. "I escaped from the ship before it sailed the harbor. I tossed a
customs man into the water, took his wallet, and walked down the gangway an hour before sailing.
"Pah!" She spat dry and catlike upon the street. "That ship was like a prison, and I've had enough of
chains. And I have no family left in the south.
"Besides." Her voice dropped in timbre and her eyes snared moonlight. "I had to come back for my
pink Berber." A grin spread over Raphael's face: a shy grin as tight as a shrunken suit of clothes. All he
could say was, "I missed you, too, Djoura." But that smile and the warmth which accompanied it
dissolved as he thought further.
"But if I am running away from my master and you are running away from your home, then where are
we going TO?"
The black woman snickered. "How about your home, Pinkie? Don't you have one, somewhere, with
a mother who would be glad to see her little boy again?
"Along with his charming friend?"
Raphael stopped dead in the exact middle of the street. He made no answer, nor did he glance at
Djoura, but stood with his hands clenched at his sides and his head bowed. He bit his lip. Djoura was
standing before him, a concerned look in her coffee-colored eyes. "I know already that you are not a
Berber," she said diffidently. "It was the music you play that confused me. But I have heard you play the
music of many places, since, and that doesn't matter."
"It doesn't? You came back for me anyway?" They were quite alone on the street. Raphael touched
her face. The look she gave him back was haughty, as though to say the reasons she did the things she
did were hers to know.
"Djoura, I don't know how to find my home anymore. My memory has been& damaged. But I know
the earth is filled with pleasant places to live. Come with me and we will find one we like."
"That is for me to say," replied the woman, shooting him a glance over a lopsided smile. "I am the one
with the wallet," she added, letting coins tinkle softly beneath her clothes.
But she let him kiss her in the darkness that came after the moon's setting.
11
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