Damiano's Lute Read Online Free PDF

seen in the distance.)
    But nowhere could he spy a lean shape of yellow and red and green, neither floating over the grass nor angrily trampling the briars. No Gaspare on the road or among the swamp maple. Not even a suspiciously bright bird shape amid the alder groves.
    Damiano’s curse began quite healthily, but trailed off into a sort of ineffectual misery. For seeking people missing or lost he was even less equipped than the average man. He had always before known where people were, known it literally with his eyes closed—been able to feel a distant presence like a breath against his face. But he didn’t know how to look for a boy, using patience and reason, going up one country wagon rut and down the next. He felt that at twenty-three he was too old to learn.
    As a matter of fact he felt too old for many activities, and the best life had to offer was most certainly sleep. As his mind spun in gripless circles around the problem of Gaspare, his lower lids crawled upward and his upper lids sank downward until his rebellious eyes closed themselves. His hands, too, had snuck up one another’s sleeve and hidden in the warmth.
    So little was pleasant in this life, and most of what there was turned out to be a mistake. Magic was self-delusion and war just a patch of bloody snow. Even one’s daily meat was the product of violent death, while love…
    The gray stone walls, burying a nun. A gray stone grave on a hillside. A small grave in a garden without a stone.
    Only music was uncorruptible, for it meant everything and nothing. In the past year Damiano had done little but play on the lute.
    His present lute was his second, successor to the little instrument smashed in Lombardy and buried beside the bones of an ugly bitch dog. This lute boasted five courses and its sound carried much farther than that of his first pretty little toy. But it was shoddily made and did not ring true high on the neck, no matter how Damiano adjusted the gut fretting. In only fifteen months’ play he had worn smooth valleys along the soft-wood fretboard.
    But now he didn’t want to play. There was no one to hear but the horse, who was tone deaf and appreciated no rhythms save his own. Besides—Damiano’s hands would not come out of their hiding.
    The sun winked in and out of clouds; he felt it against his face, like a memory of his missing witch-sense. His head filled with the mumbling voice which was always present if he allowed himself to listen.
    Sometimes it broke into his dreams, waking him. More often, like now, it droned him to sleep. Either way, he never understood it.
    And there came odd images, and thoughts. Naked women (a radiant, young naked woman: Damiano knew her name) he could understand, but why should his head be filled with concern for goats?
    He let such concerns fade with the sunlight.
    The horse did not know his driver was asleep. He needed neither whip nor rein to urge him to do what he liked most to do, which was to keep going. He lifted his feet, not with the exaggeration of fashion, but with racing efficiency. He nodded right and left to his invisible audience. His high, Arabic tail swept the air.
    He thought about oats, and never wondered why he should do so.
    Suddenly Festilligambe recognized something much better than oats. Philosophical amazement caused him to stumble, and his trot became a shuffle. A halt. He craned his long neck and regarded the crude seat of the wagon, his whinny pealing like bells.
    Damiano woke up smiling, in the presence of light. His hands leaped free of his shirt and he hid his poor, inadequate eyes behind them. “Raphael,” he cried. “I’m so glad to see you—or almost to see you.”
    Between the mortal’s shut fingers leaked an uncomfortable radiance. Damiano turned his head away, but as if in effort to counteract this seeming rejection, he scooted closer to the angel on the seat. Meanwhile, the horse was doing his level best to