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

add that my take on that venerable figure is far different from the usual folkloric depictions); Miss Anna
Sunshine Ison for los cadejos; Mardelle and Richard Kunz for putting up with far too many questions by
e-mail—and for tracking down the answers to them; Jim Harris for the lexicon; Rodger Turner and Paul
Fletcher for valiantly helping me through some rather severe computer woes (and thanks as well to Rodger for
that early reading of the manuscript); Barry Ambridge for straightening me out on tires; Swain Wolfe for
explaining the difference between power and luck; Lawrence Schmiel for vetting the Spanish (any errors are
mine); Amanda Fisher for once again helping with the bookmarks; and the folks at Tor for being very patient
this time.
I’ve been taken to task by a number of readers for not noting the music I was listening to when I’ve written my
last few books. So, this time out my ears were filled, my toes tapped, my spirit was made more full by ...
well, too large a number of fine musicians to list them all here. But briefly, of late I’ve been listening to a lot of
Steve Earle, Fred Eaglesmith, Dar Williams, Ani DiFranco, Stacey Earle, Buddy Miller, Tori Amos, the
Walkabouts (including their “Chris and Carla” recordings), and all the various incarnations in which Johnette
Napolitano finds herself, one of my favorites being the CD she recorded with Los Illegals.
When I’m actually writing, however, I lean more towards instrumental music where the words in my ear don’t
interfere with the words going down on the screen. For this book that involved less Celtic music than usual,
though Solas was never far from the CD player. Mostly I found myself playing some of those neo-Flamenco
artists such as Robert Michaels, Ottmar Leibert, Ger-ardo Nunez, and Oscar Lopez, while towards the end of
the book, Douglas Spotted Eagle’s Closer to Far Away and Robbie Robertson’s last two albums (Music for
the Native Americans and Contact from the Underworld of Red-boy) were in constant rotation.
But man does not live by worldbeat alone. Many of the hours spent on this novel found me nodding my head
to Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Charlie Haden’s duet albums, Clifford Brown, and this
wonderful ten-CD set that my friend Rodger gave me: The Complete Jazz at the Philharmonic on Verve.
If you decide to try any of the above, I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

And as usual, let me mention that the city, characters, and events to be found in these pages are fictitious.
Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
If any of you are on the Internet, come visit my homepage. The URL (address) is http://www.cyberus.ca/~cdl
—Charles de Lint, Ottawa, Spring 1999

In the middle of the journey of our life,
I came to myself within a dark wood
where the straight way was lost.
—Dante Alighieri, from The Divine Comedy
1. Los lobos
El lobo pierde los ientes mas no las mienies
The wolf loses his teeth, not his nature.
—Mexican-American saying

Like her sister, Bettina San Miguel was a small, slender woman in her mid-twenties, dark-haired and
darker-eyed; part Indio, part Mexican, part something older still. Growing up, they’d often been mistaken for
twins, but Bettina was a year younger and, unlike Adelita, she had never learned to forget. The little miracles
of the long ago lived on in her, passed down to her from their abuela, and her grandmother before her. It was a
gift that skipped a generation, tradition said.
“¡Tradición, pah!” their mother was quick to complain when the opportunity arose. “You call it a gift, but I call it
craziness.”
Their abuela would nod and smile, but she still took the girls out into the desert, sometimes in the early
morning or evening, sometimes in the middle of the night. They would leave empty-handed, be gone for hours
and return with full bellies, without thirst. Return with something in their eyes that made their mother cross
herself, though she tried to hide the gesture.