Damiano's Lute Read Online Free Page A

noise) and the second he cradled with motherly care. Then he strode off and disappeared to Gaspare’s eyes, hidden by the bulk of the wagon.
    Gaspare heard the receding footsteps. He stood and hopped from one foot to the other. Failing to see Damiano appear aroundthe wagon, he sprang gracefully to the dirt.
    It was true. The lutenist was leaving, plodding back up the road toward Lyons, Chamonix and the Alps. Without another word, he was leaving. By conscious effort, the boy turned his sensation of cold desolation into his more accustomed red anger. He caught up with Damiano in ten athletic bounds.
    â€œHah!” he spat. “So you think to stick me with that unmanageable swine of a horse? Well, it won’t work. The crows can pick his ribs for all I care!” And he executed a perfect, single-point swivel, flung up his right arm in a graceful, dynamic and very obscene gesture, and marched back down the road west and south. His small, peaked face was flaming.
    Damiano, in his outrage, had forgotten Festilligambe, and he now felt a bit foolish. His less acrobatic steps slowed to a shuffling halt, while he heard Gaspare rummaging through the wagon. At last, when the noise had faded, Damiano came back.
    The horse, while still standing between the traces, stared curiously over his shoulder at Damiano. He had a marvelous flexibility in that neck, did Festilligambe. Damiano tossed his gear back into the wagon and carefully deposited the lute into the niche in one corner which he had built for it. (This corner had no holes.)
    Slowly and spiritlessly Damiano walked over to the horse. He examined the knotted, makeshift harness and the places where it had worn at the beast’s coat. Festilligambe lipped his master’s hair hopefully, tearing out those strands which became caught between his big box teeth. Damiano didn’t appear to notice.
    â€œI shouldn’t be doing this to you, fellow,” he whispered, stroking the black back free from dust. “You are no cart horse. It’s clean straw and grain for which you were born. And fast running, with victory wine from silver cups.” Thick horse lips smacked against the young man’s face, telling him what the gelding thought about silver cups. His near hind foot suggested they start moving again.
    Having no ideas of his own, Damiano was open to such suggestion. He boosted himself up to the driver’s seat and reached for the whip he had dropped after drubbing Gaspare. Carefully he pulled up his sleeve, bunching it above the elbow to allow the sun free access to the neatly punched bite on his forearm.
    The horse did not wait for a signal to start.
    What a misery that boy was. Squatting passively on the plank of wood, Damiano let Gaspare’s offenses parade by, one by one.
    There had been that housewife in Porto. She had had no business to call the boy such names, certainly, but you cannot drive through a town cracking strange women on the head and expect to get away with it. Not even when they are bigger than you. Especially not then. She had almost broken the lute over Damiano’s shoulders (though he was by rights not involved in the exchange of insults, only easier to catch than Gaspare).
    And in Aosta they had come near to fame, or at least a comfortable living, playing before the Marchioness d’Orvil, until Gaspare ruined things and nearly got them sent to prison with that sarabande he insisted on dancing. In front of the marquese, besides. Damiano blushed even now, wondering how he could have missed seeing all winter that the dance was obscene. Gaspare had no delicacy.
    But he was touchy as a condottiere, where slights to his small self were concerned. And jealous. Though he never let Damiano forget the young man’s inexperience with women, Gaspare’s attitude was as possessive as it was mocking, and his green eyes watched Damiano’s every move. Let the lute player offer one gallant word to a female of any description,