Greenmantle Read Online Free PDF

nobody’s ass you don’t want to. You get respect that way, Tony. All the time, you get some respect. You don’t talk with a smart mouth to the capi , you don’t throw your weight around with the other soldiers, but you got something special all the same. Capito? ”
    “Sure,” Valenti said to the memory. “I understand all too well now.”
    He turned away, got dressed and went downstairs to make himself some dinner. Afterward he sat outside with a strong capuccino and watched the sunset. He sat there in the darkness for a long time, not brooding, just remembering.
    Thirty-eight now, he’d never married and was glad of it, the way things had turned out. But time was that he should loosen up a bit. Nothing stupid, but he was lonely. If the kid came back in the next few days, he’d see if she and her momma’d take him up on his offer of a spaghetti dinner. Hell, maybe he’d just give them a call.
    He wondered what the mother was like, then shook his head. That you don’t need, he told himself. Be a bit friendly, okay, but he didn’t need to complicate his life by putting the squeeze on a neighbor. For one thing, he couldn’t move away when things soured. And things, he thought on the basis of too many short-term affairs, always soured.
    He was about to go back inside, but paused as he reached for his empty coffee cup. The sound was so soft that if he hadn’t been half-expecting it, he might never have heard it at all.
    It came from the woods north of the house, a whispery piping that set the hairs at the nape of his neck a-tingle. The brooding thoughts that had been plaguing him since Ali left for home dissolved into a wash of quiet pleasure. He lowered himself slowly back into his chair and closed his eyes.
    The life that had been his was gone and with it his worries, the music told him, but the strengths that had let him stay ahead of the pack were still there. There was no need to be rid of them. All he had to do was channel them into something different. Peace might never be his, but he could still know contentment of a kind.
    He sighed, shifting in the chair. The movement broke his concentration and in the next instant the sound was gone. He opened his eyes to look at the forest.
    “One day,” he said softly, “this leg’s not gonna give me so much trouble and then I’m coming to look for you.”
    The first time he’d heard it, he’d thought it was some kind of a bird, but that was before he realized that the music was something that a bird could never make. Its melody dipped and shifted, now low and breathy, now high and skirling, but always quiet, always just on the edge of his hearing as it ran up and down the musical scale in shivering lifts and falls like no bird ever sang. Always so distant, so quiet.
    Sometimes it was so quiet he couldn’t hear it at all. He could just feel it out there, calling to him. There was more than a mystery in it. It promised him something if he could ever discover its source. What, he didn’t know. But something. And he knew he would never regret finding it when he did.
    He stayed listening for a long while after, but it was gone for the evening and at last he went inside. His dreams were full of hidden presences that night, of things that stayed just out of sight, the way the music stayed mostly just beyond his hearing. He’d never been able to remember his dreams before coming here from Malta that last time. Now he often had those kinds of dreams, and he always remembered them in the morning.

3
     
     
    Lewis Datchery was reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. His lips moved soundlessly as his gaze followed the line of print across the page. His book was propped up on the kitchen table and he was sitting on a plain-backed wooden chair that his father had made. The light of the lamp made a circular spill, leaving most of the one-room cabin in shadow. From the walls, the spines of thousands of books faced out, the lamplight glinting off the titles of those with