Shroud of Shadow by Gael Baudino Read Free Book Online

the weather was warming, and the city, like the Church, had thrown off the dark sobriety of winter and Passion Week. In the square, jugglers worked the crowds. Acrobats tumbled. A musician, after a comradely nod at Natil, started up a song. There were smiling faces and new clothes; people were talking, laughing, wenching. Even the stern face of the baronial fortress seemed gentled by the general consensus that it was time for winter to become spring.
    Omelda labored on through the hates and obsessive Office. “Stop for a moment,” said Natil suddenly. “Think: what are you singing?”
    Omelda blinked. “The Office.”
    Natil found a vacant spot on the steps that led up to the Hansa factory and sat down. The eagle feather in her hair glinted in the sunlight. “What were the words you just sang? Say them.”
    Omelda grimaced: even a hint of the Office was more than sufficient to pain her, but: “ Concupivit anima mea disiderare justificationes tuas, in omni tempore, ” she said dutifully.
    “You did not say them as you sang them, did you?”
    “I just . . . said them, that's all.”
    “Ah,” said Natil, “but you said them with expression and with feeling, as though the words actually meant something. Dame Agnes did not neglect your knowledge of Latin, did she?”
    Omelda shook her head, put her hands to her ears. “No, she didn't. I can speak Latin. But can't you just play something, Natil?”
    Natil smiled, pulled Omelda's hands down. “I shall. But listen to what I play, for I am going to play what you just sang . . . but I will play it as you said it.”
    “Is that supposed to help?”
    Natil checked the tuning of her harp, glanced up. She was already attracting a cluster of listeners. She was used to that. An outlandishly dressed woman who did not cover her head and who carried such a strange-looking harp almost always caught the attention—and usually the sympathy—of everyone within sight . . . even before she played a single note. There would probably be a few gold coins today. “Helping is what I do, Omelda. It is what I have always done. Now listen . . .”
    The strings of her harp sparkled into music, and she could not help but recall again the thing that had glittered so brightly against the profoundly blue sky of her dreams. Was it just a dream? Or was it perhaps a vision that allowed her, like Varden, to pierce a dark and abyssal shroud of shadow?

Chapter Four
    The sunlight glittered on the windows of the 747, the white contrails of the jet even whiter for the very blue Colorado sky. It was April. The Rocky Mountains were still stippled with snow, but below, in Denver, elms had leafed, apple trees had budded, and cottonwoods were hung heavy with catkins.
    There was something in the air that came inevitably with spring: a stirring that had nothing to do with temperature or weather, but which arrived every year, returning unfailingly even after the deepest, most frost-bitten and pipes-bursting-like-popcorn cold, an echo of all past winters, a promise of the newness of all future springs. And so the westbound 747 glittered in the sky, seeming itself to be a premature blossom of spring, as though 747s have been hanging whitely in the blue and April air since the beginning of time, promising connection, promising newness.
    George Morrison drove west along Highway 6, feeling old. Denver felt old. The apartment he had left behind felt more than old: it smacked of ruin and of rot, of Kleenex that had been used, wadded up, and thrown away.
    In the space of a day, he had lost his job, lost his lover, lost any feeling of roots or of belonging in the city in which he had been born. At the security firm, they had told him that his performance had not improved sufficiently. Tina had told him much the same thing.
    “ I'm tired of beating my head against the wall. I'm tired of scrounging. I'm tired of watching you sitting in front of the TV while I try to figure out where the rent's gonna come from. I'm tired