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

downward until his rebellious eyes closed themselves.
22
Damiano's Lute
His hands, too, had snuck up one another's sleeve and hidden in the warmth.
So little was pleasant in this life, and most of what there was turned out to
be a mistake. Magic was self-delusion and war just a patch of bloody snow.
Even one's daily meat was the product of violent death, while love...
The gray stone walls, burying a nun. A gray stone grave on a hillside. A small
grave in a garden without a stone.
Only music was uncorruptible, for it meant everything and nothing. In the past
year Damiano had done little but play on the lute.
His present lute was his second, successor to the little instrument smashed in
Lombardy and buried beside the bones of an ugly bitch dog. This lute boasted
five courses and its sound carried much farther than that of his first pretty
little toy. But it was shoddily made and did not ring true high on the neck,
no matter how Damiano adjusted the gut fretting. In only fifteen months' play
he had worn smooth valleys along the soft-wood fretboard.
But now he didn't want to play. There was no one to hear but the horse, who
was tone deaf and appreciated no rhythms save his own. Besides—Damiano's hands
would not come out of their hiding.
The sun winked in and out of clouds; he felt it against his face, like a
memory of his missing witch-sense. His head filled with the mumbling voice
which was always present if he allowed himself to listen.
Sometimes it broke into his dreams, waking him. More often, like now, it
droned him to sleep. Either way, he never understood it.
And there came odd images, and thoughts. Naked women (a radiant, young naked
woman: Damiano knew her name) he could understand, but why should his head be
filled with concern for goats?
He let such concerns fade with the sunlight.
The horse did not know his driver was asleep. He needed neither whip nor rein
to urge him to do what he liked most to do, which was to keep going. He lifted
his feet, not with the exaggeration of fashion, but with racing efficiency. He
nodded right and left to his invisible audience. His high, Arabic tail swept
the air.
Damiano's Lute
23
He thought about oats, and never wondered why he should do so.
Suddenly Festilligambe recognized something much better than oats.
Philosophical amazement caused him to stumble, and his trot became a shuffle.
A halt. He craned his long neck and regarded the crude seat of the wagon, his
whinny pealing like bells.
Damiano woke up smiling, in the presence of light. His hands leaped free of
his shirt and he hid his poor, inadequate eyes behind them. "Raphael," he
cried. "I'm so glad to see you—or almost to see you."
Between die mortal's shut fingers leaked an uncomfortable radiance. Damiano
turned his head away, but as if in effort to counteract this seeming
rejection, he scooted closer to the angel on the seat. Meanwhile, the horse
was doing his level best to turn around in his traces.
"I'm sorry, Dami," said the Archangel Raphael, settling in all his
immateriality next to Damiano. "I don't know what to do about that."