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

the sun. Whether foresight or merely foreboding, this certainty caused her
surprising pain.
Saara sat wretchedly in the grass, undecided about her journey and about her
own feelings, but reflecting in how many ways men disorder the lives of women.
Chapter One
The grass showed two colors, like a riffled deck of cards. All the early
marguerites bobbed in waves, up and down the hills. Each hill had an oak or
two, while the wealthier elevations also possessed orchards of apple or
plum—bare-branched, but with twigs swollen purple, pregnant with Easter's
bloom. Brambles crawled over the fields and on to the single trodden road.
Even these brambles wore a charming infant green, and their withy limbs
sprawled thornless. The sky was a cool washed blue, spittled with inconsequent
clouds.
This landscape was Provence in high morning during the third month of the
year. Nothing ill could be said about it, except that mornings had been warmer
in spring, and mornings had been a bit drier. But this springtime would
doubtless produce warmer and drier mornings in its own time.
So much was of nature. As for the man-made element which completes a
landscape, there was available nothing but three roofless huts by the road
(each with blue light shining out through the windows, dean as an empty mind)
and a trundling green wagon with two young men on the seat, pulled by a black
horse.
There was one other presence in the landscape, one which was neither quite
artifactual nor quite a part of nature. That was a bundle that lay hidden in
the long reeds spawned of a rivulet running between two hills. The bundle
consisted of four human bodies, tied together with rope and lying damply dead.
They had been there for two weeks, and the thrusting horsetails had grown
around them closely, forcing themselves into the linen shirtsleeve,
8
Damiano's Lute
between the wooden button and the hand-darned hole, and along the mutely
gaping lips. The bodies were blackish, but since it was only March, there were
few flies buzzing. Tliese blindly ambitious reeds stood to the west of the
road, and since the wind was blowing from the east, not even the nodding horse
was aware he had passed a green charnel.
This was an impressive horse: not a destrier or battle charger (that close
cousin to a plow horse) but a lean, light horse built for speed and cities,
built for races down graded boulevards with the vendors all up and down the
course selling ypocras and squares of marchpane. It had movement, this horse,
as was evident by the way it lifted up its front feet just one razor cut
before its back feet overstrode them. It had elegance, as it proclaimed in its
clean, glistening throatlatch, its ironic black eye and supple crest. By its
lean dished head and serpentine neck-set, one could see the horse carried Arab
blood. By its size of bone, and the untrustworthy set of its eye, it was part
Barb. It was a tall animal, deep-chested and long of shoulder. It was a horse
to produce wagers.
And it seemed not only to be bred for races, but to be in training for them,
for it was thin as a twist of black iron, and its head snaked left and right
with energy, snapping its poor harness of rope.
But it was not, of course, training for any such thing, for racehorses do not