R. A. MacAvoy - Damiano 03 by Raphael

Author:Raphael
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-30T19:49:44+00:00

in the tangle of leaves.

I hear him in the winter in the bare trees. He calls me.

But I—I have forgotten the language of flight.

By dint of great effort, Ama stayed quiet so far. Then she interrupted. “That sounds classical. It doesn’t rhyme. I know what it means, though, because I listen to songs a lot. When you say your father is a sparrow you mean you don’t have a father, or that he does not admit to you. And when you say you don’t remember how to fly, you mean you are a slave.”

Raphael looked startled. His left eyebrow shot up, and it seemed he was about to contradict his young mistress. But instead he replied, “Everyone must take his own meaning from a song, or it would not be a song.”

“But I’m glad you are a slave,” continued Ama, after pausing to examine his answer and finally throwing it away as a bird will throw away a prize it finds inedible. “I’m especially glad you are a… a boy, and not a man. Or else I would not be able to sit here with you with my veil off and show you my hair. With men, everything is all very difficult, They are strange beasts—men, don’t you think? All they think about is leaping on you like a bull on a cow—or I have never seen a bull and a cow, but I’m told it is the same. And so we have to stay hidden all our lives, lest we be disgraced.

“Disgraced!” she repeated, frowning solemnly and dabbling one pretty toe in the water.

“Rashiid, my husband, of course, is not like that. Not exactly like that. He is almost human. But all THAT, you know, is not very much fun.” Amas eyes roved uncertainly from a bronze-backed carp to Raphael’s attentive face. “Is it?”

Raphael laid the ud in his lap. He did not pretend to misunderstand her. “I do not know,” he replied seriously. “About men with women.” Ama snickered.

“Of course you don’t.”,

Her slaves expression did not lighten. “But as life comes from Allah, every part of it must have some beauty in it.”

Ama gave a tiny sniff. “Don’t talk like a book!”

Then, in the next moment, a spark appeared in her brown eyes. Assuring herself that the garden court was empty except for Raphael and herself, she said, “Let me sit on your lap.”

Dutifully the slave put his instrument aside, and little Ama snuggled up to him. Raphael stroked her as one would stroke a cat, and suddenly, for no perceivable reason, he laughed out loud.

Justly he could call himself Rashiid ben Rashiid, for he was a self-made man, come far from his father’s mule stud. He had left Granada early, having a dislike for livestock and mules in particular, and made his money in lower Egypt, coming home with a regular income and a new name. Once home he bought a house and planted orange trees (whose fruit was forbidden by law to the infidel) everywhere. But Rashiid had not completely buried Paolo, son of Pablo.

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