"Charles de Lint - Forests Of The Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

Bettina tried to imagine Nuala in a skirt.
“But they grew tired of waiting,” the older woman said. “They went their way and I remained, and I haven’t
seen them now for many years.” She paused, then added, “Until you called to them.”
“I didn’t call them.”
“You didn’t have to. You’re young and pretty and enchantment runs in your veins as easily as blood. Is it so
odd that they come like bees to your flower?”
“I thought they were part of ... the mystery,” Bettina said.
“There’s no mystery as to what they want,” Nuala told her. “But perhaps I am being unfair. As I said, I’ve never
spoken to them, never asked what they wanted from me. Perhaps they only wished for news of our
homeland, of those they’d left behind.”
Bettina nodded. Spirits were often hungry for gossip.
“Sometimes,” she said, “what one mistakes for spirits are in fact men, traveling in spirit form.”
“I’ve never met such,” Nuala told her.
Nuala might not have, but when she was younger, Bettina had. Many of them had been related to her by
blood. Her father and her uncles and their friends, Indios all, would gather together in the desert in a similar
fashion as los lobos did in the yard outside the house here. Squatting in a circle, sharing a canteen, smoking
their cigarettes, sometimes calling up the spirit of the mescal, swallowing the small buttons that they’d
harvested from the dome-shaped cacti in New Mexico and Texas.
Peyoteros, Abuela called them.
At first, Bettina had thought it was a tribal designation—like Yaqui, Apache, Tohono O’odham—but then
Abuela had explained how they followed another road into the mystery from the one she and her abuela
followed, that the peyote buttons they ate, the mescal tea they drank, was how they stepped into la epoca
del mito. Bettina decided they were still a tribe, only connected to each other by their visions rather than their
genes.
“Where I come from,” she told Nuala, “such men seek a deeper understanding of the world and its workings.”
“But you are no longer where you come from,” Nuala said.
This was true.
“And understand,” Nuala went on. “Such beings answer only to themselves. No one holds you personally
responsible for their presence. I’m simply making conversation. Offering an observation, nothing more.”
“I understand.”
“And perhaps a caution.” Nuala added. “They are like wolves, those spirits.”
Bettina nodded. “Los lobos,” she said.
“Indeed. And what you must remember about wolves is that they cannot be tamed. They might seem friendly,
but in their hearts they remain wild creatures. Feral. Incorrigibly amoral. It’s not that they are evil. They simply
see the world other than we do, see it in a way that we can never wholly understand.”
She seemed to know a great deal about them, Bettina thought, for someone who had never spoken with
them.
“And they are angry,” Nuala said after a moment.
“Angry?” Bettina asked. “With whom?”
Nuala shrugged. “With me, certainly.”
“But why?”
Again there was that long moment of hesitation.
“Because I have what they lack,” Nuala finally said. “I have a home. A place in this new world that I can call
my own.”
The housekeeper smiled then. Her gaze became mild, la brujería in her eyes diminishing into a distant
smolder once more.
“It’s late,” she said. “I should be in bed.” She moved to the door, pausing in the threshold. “Aren’t you sitting
for Chantal in the morning? You should try to get some rest yourself.”
“I will.”
“Good. Sleep well.”