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

Bettina nodded. “Gracias,”she said. “You, too.”
But she was already speaking to Nuala’s back.
What an odd conversation, she thought as she went over to the table and began to put the milagros back into
the envelope she had taken them from earlier. Nuala, who so rarely offered an opinion, little say started a
conversation, had been positively gregarious this evening.
Bettina’s gaze strayed to the window. She couldn’t see beyond the dark pane, but she remembered. After a
moment, she took down someone’s parka from the peg where it hung by the door and put it on. It was far too
big for her, but style wasn’t the issue here. Warmth was. Giving the kitchen a last look, she slipped out the
door.
It was already colder than it had been earlier. Frosted grass crunched under her shoes as she walked to
where the men had been watching the house. There was no sign now that they’d ever been. They’d even
taken their cigarette butts with them when they’d withdrawn from the yard.
She considered how they would have gone. First into the trees, then down the steep slope to where these few
wild acres came up hard against the shoulders of the city. From there, on to the distant mountains. Or
perhaps not. Perhaps they made their home here, in the city.
She closed her eyes, imagining them loping through the city’s streets. Had they even kept to human form, or
was there now a wolf pack running through the city? Perhaps a scatter of wild dogs since dogs would be less
likely to attract unwanted attention. Or had they taken to the air as hawks, or crows? Knowing as little as she
did about them, it was impossible to say.
She walked on, past the gazebo, into the trees where, in places, snow lay in thick drifts. The cottages were
all dark, their occupants asleep. A thin trail of smoke rose from the chimney of Virgil Hanson’s, the only one
of the six to have a working fireplace. She regarded it curiously for a moment, wondering who was inside. In
all the months that she had been living here, that cottage had stood empty.
Past the buildings, the trees grew more closely together. She followed a narrow trail through the undergrowth,
snow constantly underfoot now, but it had a hard crust under a few inches of the more recent fall, and held
her weight.
There was no indication that anyone had been this way before her. At least not since the last snowfall.
There was a spot at the back of the property, an enormous jut of granite that pushed out of the wooded slope
and offered a stunning view of the city spread out for miles, all the way north to the foothills of the mountains.
Bet-tina was careful as she climbed up the back of it. Though there was no snow, she remembered large
patches of ice from when she’d been here a week or so ago. In the summer, they would sometimes sit out
near the edge, but she was feeling nowhere near so brave today. She went only so far as she needed to get a
view of the mountains, then straightened up and looked north.
At first she couldn’t tell what was wrong. When it came to her, her legs began to tremble and she shivered in
her borrowed parka with its long dangling sleeves.
“Dios mio,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.
There were no lights from the city to be seen below. None at all.
She felt dizzy and backed slowly away until she could clutch the trunk of one of the tamaracks that grew up
around the rock. For a long moment, it was all that kept her upright. She looked back, past the edge of the
stone where normally the glow of the city would rise up above the tops of the trees, but the sky was the dark
of a countryside that had never known light pollution. The stars felt as though they were closer to her than
she’d ever seen them in the city. They were desert stars, displaced to this land, as feral as los lobos.
Myth time, she thought. She’d drifted into la epoca del mito without knowing it, walked into a piece of the
past where the city didn’t exist yet, or perhaps into the days to come when it was long gone.
“It is easier to stray into another’s past than it is to find one’s way out again,” someone said.
The voice came from the trees, the speaker invisible in the undergrowth and shadows, but she didn’t have to
see him to know that he was one of los lobos. “We are wise women,” Abuela liked to say. “Not because we
are wise, but because we seek wisdom.” And then she’d smile, adding, “Which in the end, is what makes us
seem so wise to others.” But Bettina didn’t feel particularly wise tonight, for she knew what he’d said was
true. It was not so uncommon to step unawares into myth time and never emerge again into the present.