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

“They miss too much school,” she would say.
“Time enough for the Anglos’ school when they are older,” Abuela replied.
“And church? If they die out there with you, their sins unforgiven?”
“The desert is our church, its roof the sky. Do you think the Virgin and los santos ignore us because it has no
walls? Remember, hija, the Holy Mother was a bride of the desert before she was a bride of the church.”
Mama would shake her head, muttering, “Nosotras estamos locas todas.” We are all crazy. And that would
be the end of it. Until the next time.
Then Adelita turned twelve and Bettina watched the mysteries fade in her sister’s eyes. She still
accompanied them into the desert, but now she brought paper and a pencil, and rather than learn the
language of la lagartija, she would try to capture an image of the lizard on her paper. She no longer absorbed
the history of the landscape; instead she traced the contours of the hills with the lead in her pencil. When
she saw el halcón winging above the desert hills, she saw only a hawk, not a brujo or a mystic like their
father, caught deep in a dream of flight. Her own dreams were of boys and she began to wear makeup.
All she had learned, she forgot. Not the details, not the stories. Only that they were true.
But Bettina remembered.
“You taught us both,” she said to her abuela one day when they were alone. They sat stone-still in the
shadow cast by a tall saguaro, watching a coyote make its way with delicate steps down a dry wash. “Why
is it only I remember?”
The coyote paused in mid-step, lifting its head at the sound of her voice, ears quivering, eyes liquid and
watchful.
“You were the one chosen,” Abuela said.
The coyote darted up the bank of the wash, through a stand of palo verde trees, and was gone. Bettina turned
back to her grandmother.
“But why did you choose me?” she asked.
“It wasn’t for me to decide,” Abuela told her. “It was for the mystery. There could only be one of you,
otherwise la brujería would only be half so potent.”
“But how can she just forget? You said we were magic—that we were both magic.”
“And it is still true. Adelita won’t lose her magic. It runs too deep in her blood. But she won’t remember it, not
like you do. Not unless ....”
“Unless what?”
“You die before you have a granddaughter of your own.”

Tonight Bettina sat by the window at a kitchen table many miles from the desert of her childhood, the phone
propped under one ear so that she could speak to Adelita while her hands remained free to sort through the
pile of milagros spilled across the table. Her only light source was a fat candle that stood in a cracked
porcelain saucer, held in place by its own melted wax.
She could have turned the overhead on. There was electricity in the house—she could hear it humming in the
walls and it made the old fridge grumble in the corner from time to time—but she preferred the softer
illumination of the candle to electric lighting. It reminded her of firelight, of all those nights sitting around out
back of Adelita’s house north of Tubac, and she was in a campfire mood tonight. Talking with her sister did
that, even if they were a half continent and a few time zones apart, connected only by the phone and the
brujería in their blood.
The candlelight glittered on the small silver votive offerings and made shadows dance in the corners of the
room whenever Bettina moved her arm. Those shadows continued to dance when the candle’s flame pointed
straight up at the ceiling once more, but she ignored them. They were like the troubles that come in life—the
more attention one paid to them, the more likely they were to stay. They were like the dark-skinned men who
had gathered outside the house again tonight.
Every so often they came drifting up through the estates that surrounded Kellygnow, a dozen or so tall, lean
men, squatting on their haunches in a rough circle in the backyard, eyes so dark they swallowed light.
Bettina had no idea what brought them. She only knew they were vaguely related to her grandmother’s