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

But this was not strictly true—that she heard no other voice but hers. There
was one other: the one that echoed in her head like her own thoughts, and yet
was foreign to her, a voice soft and deep in slurred Italian. A voice which
asked her questions.
"Where is he gone?" it asked her and, "Is it time to go home? Can I go home
now?"
Never had Saara any answers for it.
This bodiless voice had been couched within her own head for over a year,
serving only to make Saara feel as discontented as it was and more howlingly
alone.
To distract her from these unanswerable questions she had tried work, until
now her garden was blooming as never before and all her herb-pots were full.
Then she had played with the weather, making the nearby villagers miserable.
Following the visit of a brave delegate from Ludica, she curtailed
experimentation and attempted to lose herself in her own woods, in bird shape.
But that effort was least effective of all, for what reply has a wood dove to
questions a Lappish witch cannot answer?
Now, as springtime took hold of the earth, Saara found nothing in all her wild
refuge to interest her but this one strayed goat.
And the goat was disappointing. After spending all morning trying to entice
her, Saara could approach just close enough to feed the doe a few willow
withies and some fiddleheads of the new ferns. Most of these treats the animal
spat out (as though to say she was no common nanny, to eat anything that
happened to be green and given).
So Saara sang the goat a new song: a song of the first day in June, with a
romping kid on the hilltop (instead of kicking in the belly), crisp sun in the
sky and dry feet in the grass.
Saara sang in the strange tongue of the Lapps, which was her own. It made as
much sense to the doe as any other tongue. The animal stared dourly at Saara
with
Damiano's Lute 3
amber eyes the size of little apples, each eye with a mysterious black box in
the center.
After receiving enough song-spelling to turn all the wolves in Lappland into
milk puppies, die doe condescended to recline herself in the litter of spring
bloom.
Saara was already lying down, flat on her stomach, head propped on hands,
mother-naked. She had braided her hair into tails when she had her morning
bath. It subsequently dried that way, so now, when she freed it from its
little pieces of yarn, it gave her a mass of rippling curls which shaded from
red to black to gold in a cascade down her petal-pink back.
She might have been-a tall peasant girl of sixteen. Her body was slim and
salamander-smooth, her face was dimpled and her green eyes set slantwise. With
one foot pointed casually into the pale blue sky, Saara looked as charming and
ephemeral as a clear day in March.
She had looked that way for at least forty years.
"Coat," she announced, aiming at the animal a green disk of yarrow, "you
should eat more. For the baby."
But the goat was still chewing a sliver of green bark she had deigned to take
ten minutes before. She flopped her heavy ears and pretended she didn't