Free A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin Page B

forth.
    "It gets as white and hard as glacial ice. It dazzles so that you can barely look at it—and all the weight comes back until it seems like one of those huge chandeliers that, at the opera or in palaces of state, in being so high, sharp, and heavy, tend to discourage people from standing underneath them.
    "With the city off to one side and the moon directly above, I hope I don't walk crookedly, like a Dutch milkmaid with one bucket at the end of her yoke and the other balanced on her head.
    "In the darkness you will see two large bodies of light—one fixed and the other moving in a sure arc. Only in the morning, when the sun comes up, will you see three, and, as the sun rises, the other two will fade away."
    "Not true," Nicolò said. "Look. Here's the third. It's making noise."
    Alessandro turned, and saw lights winding along an erratic path. The perfect apposition of the moon and the city of Rome was broken by the unexpected arrival of a convoy of cars and trucks. One of the trucks, strung with lights that sparkled across the valley, was carrying a brass band.
    "That's why Acereto was deserted," Alessandro speculated. "They must have been helping out in Lanciata. It's higher and colder there. They probably pool resources to take in the crop at Lanciata first. And they bring along a band."
    "They're going to pass by," Nicolò declared.
    "Of course. This is the road."
    "What shall we do?"
    "What would you wish to do?"
    "Should we just sit here?"
    "Unless for some reason you want to stop them," Alessandro answered.
    "They won't even see us."
    "So what. We'll see them."
    "We'll be in the dark. They'll go right by."
    "What's wrong with that?"
    "I don't know. It'll be as if we don't exist, as if we're dead."
    Alessandro nodded.
    "I would have run out to greet them."
    "You can if you wish."
    "I don't want to be a pair of eyes in the darkness."
    "Struggle as you may," Alessandro said, "that is what you will someday be. Tell me, a minute ago was Rome any the less, was the moon any the less, because you could not run out to greet them?"
    Nicolò was already resigned to watching the lights as they passed in the dark. "No," he said. "They weren't less."
    "If anything," Alessandro continued, "the distance is to our advantage. I'm perfectly content to watch the celebrants from here in the dark. Let them go by. We'll lose nothing. To the contrary, and may God forgive us, as they go past and we remain, we'll take from them everything they have."
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    P ARTS OF a song floated up to them on the wind, and were interrupted like a telephone conversation on a faulty line, but as the band truck and the convoy it led came closer, the music was welded together and its stammerings vanished. Riding on the truck was a village orchestra with old instruments, not enough time to practice, and a little too much wine. Every musician, however, was
a virtuoso who followed an independent line. Though the conductor made dramatic, elegant, sweeping gestures, the meaning of which he had never learned, even had he known what they meant his musicians would not have.
    Still, the music was enchanting, if only because of accidental harmonies in its collective dissonance. The clarinet and the glockenspiel, unknowingly, would for a moment or two engage in an apparently random duet that could have put the musicians of La Scala to shame, and then go their separate ludicrous ways. Sound upon sound, reinforcing and combining outside the poorly followed plan, sometimes lit up the amateur orchestra with a kind of glory that transfixed the old man, who knew that this was how brass bands have packed village squares from time immemorial.
    On rows of improvised benches built into hay trucks were scores of exhausted farmers and their wives. One truck pulled a trailer stacked with tools that glimmered in the moonlight. As the convoy passed Alessandro and Nicolò in the shadows, they saw a figure rise to its feet in one truck and lean against the slatted