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

“Would that be so terrible?” she was about to ask.
For she found herself wanting to be here to see the salmon wake. To call it by name. An bradán. To watch its
slow lazy movements through the water and hear it speak. To be changed. But the question died stillborn as
she turned back to the pool. On the far side of the water, a stranger was standing—a tall, older man, as
dark-haired and dark-skinned as el lobo, but she knew immediately that he wasn’t one of her companion’s
compadres. Los lobos were very male and there was something almost androgynous about the angular
features of the stranger. He seemed to be a priest, in his black cassock and white collar, and what might be
a rosary dangling from the fingers of one hand. There was an old-fashioned cut to his cassock, his hair, the
style of his dusty boots. It was as though he’d stepped here directly from one of the old missions back home.
Stepped here, not only from the desert, but from the past as well.
His gaze rested thoughtfully on her and for a long moment she couldn’t speak. Then he looked down at the
water. She followed his gaze to see the salmon stirring, but before it could wake, before it could speak, el
lobo pulled her away from the fountain and the priest, out of myth time into the cold night of her own world,
her own time.
They stood beside Salvador’s carp pond, the water frozen. From nearby, the windows of the house cast
squares of pale light across the lawn. Bettina shivered and drew the loose flaps of her borrowed parka closer
about her, holding them shut with her folded arms.
“Who was that man?” she asked.
“I saw no man,” el lobo replied.
“There was a padre ... standing across from us, on the other side of the pool ...”
Her companion smiled. “There was no man,” he said. “Only you and I and the spirits of the otherwhere.”
“Bueno. Then it was a spirit I saw, for he was nothing like you or your friends.”
His smile returned, mildly mocking. “And what are we like?”
Bettina merely shrugged.
“You think of us as wolves.”
“So now you read minds?” Bettina asked.
“I don’t need to. I can read eyes. You are wary of us, of our wild nature.”
“I’m wary of any stranger I meet in the woods at night.”
He ignored that. “Perhaps you are wise to be wary. We are not such simple creatures as your Spanish
wolves.”
Bettina raised her eyebrows. “Then what are you?”
“In the old land, they called us an felsos, but it was out of fear. The same way they spoke of the fairies as
their Good Neighbors.”
They were no longer in myth time, so there was no convenient translation for the term he’d used to describe
himself. She still spoke Spanish, but he had switched to an accented English. She hadn’t noticed until this
moment.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“I could be a friend.”
“And if I don’t want a wolf for a friend?”
Again that smile of his. “Did I say I was your friend?”
Before she could respond, he turned and stepped away. Not simply into the forest, but deeper and farther
away, into la epoca del mito. Bettina had no intention of following him, though his sudden disappearance
woke a whisper of disappointment in her.
She stood for a long moment, looking down at the frozen surface of the pond, then into the trees. Finally she
shook her head and began to make her way back to the house. As she crossed the frozen lawn, she caught
a flutter of movement in one of the second-floor windows, as though a curtain had been held open and had
now fallen back into place. It took her a moment to remember whose window it was. Nuala’s.
She kept on walking, eager for the warmth inside. In the few brief moments since el lobo had brought her
back into her own time, the bitter cold had already worked its way under her borrowed parka and was nibbling
deep at her bones. But she was barely aware of her discomfort.