Damiano's Lute Read Online Free

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, snake-like 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 me!” He repeated it twice, wonderingly. “Why?”
    Suddenly Gaspare was all composure, and he knew the answer to that question as he spoke it. “I wanted to see if you were still alive at all. You don’t act like it, you know, except when you play the lute. I thought maybe you died last winter, during the battle of San Gabriele, and had not yet noticed.
    â€œA man gets tired,” Gaspare concluded, “of talking with the dead.”
    Still gaping, Damiano pulled his woolen sleeve up. “Mother of God,” he whispered, staring at the neat oval of broken skin, where stripes of crimson were welling over the bronze. “You have bitten me like you were a dog! Worse, for no dog has ever bitten me.” His head went from side to side in shocked, old-womanish gestures, and his eyes on the wound were very large.
    Gaspare sat very tall on the wagon seat. The yellow and green of his dagged jerkin outlined the ribs over his emotion-puffed chest. “Best work I’ve done in weeks,” he stated. “Should have seen yourself hop.”
    Then he settled in the seat, like a bird shifting its weight from wings to perch. “You’ve been unbearable, lutenist. Absolutely unbearable for weeks. No man with a spirit could endure your company.”
    Receiving this additional shock, Damiano let his wounded arm drop. “Unbearable? Gaspare! I haven’t even raised my voice to you. You’re the one who has been howling and complaining since we hit the French side of the pass….”
    â€œExactly!” The boy thrust out one knobbed finger. “Even though it is to meet my sister we are traveling across France and Provence in cold, dry Lent. It is me who complains, because I am a man. And you bear with me with a saintly, condescending patience which undermines my manhood.” Now Gaspare stood, declaiming from the footboard (which wobbled) of the high seat.
    â€œTo err is human. Yes! I am a human man and proud of it! To forgive… and forgive, and forgive… that is diabolic.”
    Suddenly the older fellow’s dark face darkened, and he kicked a wheel as he muttered, “Did you have to say that—exactly that, Gaspare? Diabolic? A man can also get tired of being called a devil.”
    Gaspare snorted and wiped his nose on his long, tight sleeve. “No fear. You possess no such dignity. You are the unwitting—and I do mean unwitting —tool of wickedness, designed to lead me to damned temptation! By Saint Gabriele, Damiano, I believe you lost your head with that cursed Roman General Pardo in the town hall cellar, for you’ve been nothing but a ghost of a man since.”
    Damiano stared at Gaspare, and then stared through him. Five seconds later, for no perceivable reason, he flinched. His uninjured arm gestured about his head, dispersing unseen flies. Without a word he stepped to the side of the wagon and climbed into it through one of its large holes. A moment later he was out again, carrying a bundle with a strap and another bundle wrapped in flannel. The first he slid over his back (it made a tinkling