"R. A. MacAvoy - Damiano's Lute" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

To my mother
DAMIANOS LUTE
A Bantam Book I May 1984
All rights reserved.
Copyright O 1984 by R. A. UacAvoy
Cover art copyright © 7984 by Jim Bums.
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Has he tempered the viol's wood
To enforce both the grave and the acute'1
Has he curved us the bowl of the lute?
EZRA POUND "Pisan Cantos"
DAMIANO'S LUTE
Prelude
Saara's song could make a garden out of a barren mountainside, or cover a hill
of flowers with snow. When she sang, it was with a power that killed men as
well as healed them. She could sing the winter and the summer, weeping and
dancing and sleep. She could sing the clouds in their traces and the water in
the bog.
She sang (this particular morning) a mighty song, replete with clouds and
boglands, barren hills and lush, summer and winter, weeping, dancing and every
other sort of earthly event. She sang from dim matins to high prime. At the
end of this singing her voice was ragged; she was blue in the face and she saw
spots before her eyes. But Saara's power of song had for once felled her, for
she had not been able to sing one doe goat into a good mood.
And this was unfortunate, for Saara neither wanted to loll nor heal, and she
desired neither carpets of snow nor Bowers, but only the trust of this one
ungainly creature, as companion in her loneliness.
Of all creatures (except perhaps for the cat) the goat is the hardest to
sing-spell, having more than its fair share of natural witchery. Further, of
all the changes one can work upon a goat, contentment is the most difficult
state to obtain. To make things even more trying for Saara, this particular
doe was encumbered by a dead winter coat she was too out of condition to shed,
and was uncomfortably pregnant besides. Her gaunt sides resembled a
hide-covered boat matted with brown algae. She wanted nothing to do with
company, and had to be chased from the pineslope to the hill-dome crowned with
birches before allowing herself to be befriended.
2 Damiano's Lute
Yet this obdurate goat was alkthe company springtime had delivered to Saara
amid the Alpine crocus and the purple hyacinth. Saara was not about to let the
beast starve herself through obstinacy, not while Saara herself so needed some
kind of voice in her ears besides her own.