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

scythed the bright and turgid grasses, and now he reached down for them in
full rebellion. Damiano's eyes stayed open long enough for him to pull the
reins right.
They were s.trange, those eyes of Damiano. They were dark and soft and heavily
feathered, and in all ways what one desired and expected in a Latin eye. They
were the sort of eye which is obviously created to house mysteries, and yet
their only mystery was that they seemed to hide no mysteries at all, no more
than the dark, soft eyes of a cow at graze. When Gaspare looked deeply into
Damiano's eyes (as happened most frequently when Gaspare was angry) he
sometimes had the fantasy that he was looking straight through the man and at
an empty sky
12
Damiano's Lute
behind. At those times the little hairs stood up on Gaspare's arms.
Gaspare's own pale green eyes flashed. "Well, do not be alarmed, musician, for
I don't think you're about to be offered frumenty. Nor olives, nor breads, nor
roast pork, nor wine, nor..."
"Do be quiet," sighed the other, his loose shoulders slumping in exaggerated,
Italian fashion. "This land of talk doesn't help. If you could think of
something constructive to do about it..."
Gaspare set his jaw, watching the last of the three ruined huts pass behind
the wagon and be gone. "I have thought of something constructive. I told you,
we should eat what God has put in our path."
The weary black eyes lit with amusement. "God sent that wether on to our road?
Might He not also have sent the shepherd to follow? In which case our skins
might have been stretched over a door alongside the sheepskin."
"We saw no shepherd," spat Gaspare.
Damiano nodded. "Ah, true. But then we lolled no sheep!" He spoke with a
certain finality, as though his words had proven a point, but there was
something in his words which said also that he did not care.
Gaspare's expressive eyes rolled. (He, too, was Italian.) "I wasn't even
talking about the sheep, musician. Nothing to get us in trouble with the
peasants. I meant hares and rabbits. Birds. The wild boar..."
Damiano peered sidelong, "Have you ever seen a -wild boar, Gaspare?"
The redhead responded with an equivocal gesture. "Not... close up. You?"
Damiano shook his head, sending his own black mane flying. His hair was so
long and disordered it was almost too. heavy to curl. "I don't think so.
Though I'm not sure how it would differ from a domestic boar." With one hand
he swept the hair back from his face, in a gesture that also had the purpose
(vestigial, by this time) of throwing back the huge sleeves of a gown of
fashion.
"But, my friend, how have I ever stopped you from availing yourself of these
foods? Have I hidden your knife, perhaps, or prevented you from setting a
snare? Have I by word or deed attempted to discourage you... ?"
Damiano's Lute
13
Gaspare broke in. "I can't do it... when you won't." Nothing about his
colleague bothered him half so much as Damiano's educated vocabulary and
poetical syntax. These mannerisms struck Gaspare like so many arrows, and he
never doubted that Damiano used them that way to keep Gaspare (guttersnipe