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

that he was) in his place. Gaspare would certainly have used such words in
that fashion, if he'd known them. Yet at the same time the boy was as proud of
Damiano's learning as if it had been his own.
Gaspare's unspoken respect for his partner bordered oh religious reverence,
and he lived under a fear that someday Damiano would discover that. This
thought was insupportable to the haughty urchin.
Damiano, of course, had known Gaspare's real feelings since the beginning of
their partnership. But that knowledge didn't make tile boy any easier to take.
The musician looked away, resting his gaze upon the purple horizon. He didn't
like quarrels. He didn't have Gaspare's energy to spend on them. "I don't know
how to set a snare, Gaspare," he mumbled, and let the breezes of Provence wind
through his vacant mind.
The boy snorted. "But would you set one if I showed you how? Would you pluck a
lark, or clean a rabbit, or even eat one if I cooked it for you?" He
forestalled his friend's slow headshake. "No, of course you wouldn't. Well,
that's why I can't, either—or 111 be a bloodstained shambles-man in my own
eyes. And so well both starve to death."
Damiano gentry corrected the horse. He yawned, partly because of the sun
through a woolen shirt, and pertly because discussions like this exhausted
him. He wished there were some way he could communicate to Gaspare how like a
bund man he felt, or perhaps like one who could not remember his own name. Not
that Damiano was blind (only nearsighted), and not that he had forgotten
anything. But he had been a witch and now was one no longer, and that was more
than enough. Surely if the boy understood...
But all he could bring himself to say was: "Please, Gaspare. I get so tired."
His lack of response brought the flush stronger into
14
Damiano's Lute
Gaspare's face. "We will starve, and it will be att your fault!" he shouted,
in an effort to be as unfair as possible.
Damiano did not look at him.
Gaspare's color went from red to white with sheer rage. That he should have to
follow this lifeless stick from place to place like a dog, dependent upon him
for music (which was both Gaspare's living and his life), for companionship,
and even for language (for Gaspare spoke nothing but Italian)... it was
crushing, insupportable. Tears leaked out of Gaspare's eyes.
'But tears were not Gaspare's most natural mode of expression. Convulsively he
grabbed Damiano's arm and drew it to him. With a canine growl he sank his
teeth into it.
Damiano stood up in the seat howling. Gaspare tasted blood but he did not let
go, no more than any furious terrier, not until the wooden handle of the
horsewhip came crashing down on his head and shoulders.
Damiano then threw himself down from the seat of the moving wagon, clutching
his bleeding arm and dancing over the shoulder of the road. The gelding
pattered to a halt and turned its elegant, snakelike head.
Above, on the high wooden seat, young Gaspare sat, red as a boiled crab, and
puffing like a bellows.
Damiano stared, slack-jawed, at him. "You bit mel" He repeated it twice,
wonderingly. "Why?"
Suddenly Gaspare was all composure, and he knew the answer to that question as