Damiano Read Online Free PDF Page A

commanded. The bellowing raised in him an answering anger. His fingers tightened upon the black wood of his staff.
    Without warning the air was filled with booming, as every door and shutter in the building slammed back upon its hinges. Sparks crackled in the folds of Damiano’s woolen robe. The light wooden door of the audience chamber trembled for half a minute. A cloud of plaster dust fell.
    Pardo regarded it calmly. “I could feel that,” he remarked, “in my ears.”
    Damiano kept his mouth shut, feeling he had done enough, and knowing that slamming doors would not protect him from a regiment of swordsmen. Besides, he was tired.
    â€œThat’s what I was trying to find out,” added the general conversationally, as he nudged the stool in Damiano’s direction. “Sit down, Signor Delstrego. I want to talk to you.”
    â€œThank you, General.” Damiano lowered himself gratefully onto the cushion. “I also, was wanting to speak with you.”
    â€œAhh?”
    Uttered by a Piedmontese, that single, interrogatory syllable would have echoed in the back of the throat and in the nose, like the crooning of a mother cat. At the most a Piedmontese would have glanced at his companion as he spoke to show him it was to him the inquiry was addressed. But General Pardo was a Roman by birth. Both eyebrows shot up and his lips pulled back from his teeth. The intensity of interest revealed by the single syllable of “Ahhh?” seemed in Damiano’s eyes excessive: a thing too, too pointed, almost bloodthirsty. It was of a piece with the general’s appearance and his snapping temper.
    These Italians, Damiano thought—not meaning to include the Piedmontese—they are too hot and too cold together. Passionate and unreliable.
    â€œTo speak with me? I expected as much,” concluded Pardo, with some satisfaction. “Well be my guest, Signor Dottore. I slept in a bed for the first time in a week, last night, and now am disposed to listen.”
    Damiano spared only a moment to wonder whose bed the general had slept in, and whether the original owner of it now slept on a straw pile or in the hand of God. Then he put his mind to the task.
    He leaned forward on his stool, his legs crossed at the ankles, each knee draped in gold cloth like the smooth peak of a furrowed mountain. His staff was set between his feet, and it pointed at the cracked roof and the heavens beyond. Against the ebony he leaned his cheek, and the wood was invisible next to unruly curls of the same color. His eyes, too, were black, and his mouth childishly soft. A painter or a poet, seeing that unlined face, might have envisioned it as springtime, a thing pretty enough in itself but more important in its promise of things to come.
    General Pardo looked at Damiano, but he was not a painter or a poet. He noticed the huge hands, like the paws of a pup still growing, and he saw Damiano, like a pup still growing, as a bit of a clown.
    â€œIt is about this city,” Damiano began, and was immediately interrupted, as Pardo inquired what city he meant.
    â€œPartestrada,” replied Damiano, wondering how the general could be so slow. “Partestrada has been under Savoy governance for many years.”
    â€œIf you can call it governance,” introjected Pardo.
    Damiano paused to show he had heard the other, then continued. “In that time the city has grown from a town of four hundred families into the only place of any note between Turin and Aosta.”
    â€œOf any note...” echoed Pardo doubtfully.
    â€œHer people are healthy, her surrounding croplands flourish. She supports two silversmiths and a...” Damiano decided not to mention the vineyard at this time. “... and she is located on the Evançon, a river that is passable almost its entire length. She has grown like the child of the mountains that she is.”
    â€œAnd you would like her to continue in the same