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

touched the savings she’d brought with her. Most mornings she sat for one or another of the artists,
sometimes for a group of them. Her afternoons and evenings were usually her own. At first she explored the
city, but when the weather turned colder, she cocooned in the house, reading, listening to music in one or
another of the communal living rooms, often spending time in the company of the gardener Salvador and
helping him prepare the property for winter.
And she began to trade her fetishes and channs. First to some of those living in the house, then to
customers the residents introduced her to. As her abuela had taught her, she set no fee, asked for no
recompense, but they all gave her something anyway. Mostly money, but sometimes books they thought she
would like, or small pieces of original art—sketches, drawings, color studies—which she preferred the most.
Her walls were now decorated with her growing hoard of art while a stack of books rose thigh-high from the
floor beside her chair.
The few months grew into a half year, and now the house felt like a home. She was no closer to discovering
what had drawn her to this city, what it was that whispered in her bones from the hills to the north, but it
didn’t seem as immediate a concern as it had when she’d first stepped off the plane, her small suitcase in
one hand, her knapsack on her back with its herbs, tinctures, and the raw materials with which she made her
fetishes. The need to know was no longer so important. Or perhaps she was growing more patient—a
concept that would have greatly amused her abuela. She could wait for the mystery to come to her.
As she knew it would. Her visions of what was to come weren’t always clear, especially when they related to
her, but of this she was sure. She had seen it. Not the details, not when or exactly where, or even what face
the mystery would present to her. But she knew it would come. Until then, every day was merely another
step in the journey she had undertaken when she first began to learn the ways of the spiritworld at the knee
of her abuela, only now the days took her down a road she no longer recognized, where the braid of her India
and Mexican past became tangled with threads of cultures far less familiar.
But she was accepting of it all, for la epoca del mito had always been a confusing place for her. When she
was in myth time, she was often too easily distracted by all the possibilities: that what had been might really
be what was to come, that what was to come might be what already was. Mostly she had difficulty with the
true face of a thing. She mixed up its spirit with its physical presence. Its true essence with the mask it
might be wearing. Its history with its future. It didn’t help that Newford was like the desert, a place readily
familiar with spirits and ghosts and strange shifts in what things seemed to be. Where many places only held
a quiet whisper of the otherwhere, here thousands of voices murmured against one another and sometimes it
was hard to make out one from the other.
The house at the top of Handfast Road where she now lived was a particularly potent locale. Kellygnow and
its surrounding wild acres appeared to be a crossroads between time zones and spirit zones, something that
had seemed charming and pleasantly mysterious until los lobos began to squat in its backyard, smoking
their cigarettes and watching, watching. Now she couldn’t help but wonder if their arrival spelled the end of her
welcome here.
“You might not know them,” Nuala said as though in response to her worries, “but you called them here all
the same.”
Bettina shook her head. “I doubt it,” she tried, willing it to be true. “They are spirits of this place and I am the
stranger.”
But Nuala, la brujería less hidden in her eyes than Bettina had ever seen it before, shook her head.
“No,” she said. “They are as much strangers as you are. They have only been here longer.”
Bettina nodded. The shallow rooting of their spirits said as much.
“How do you know this?” she asked.
Nuala hesitated for a long moment before she finally replied. “I recognize them from my childhood. They are
spirits of my homeland, only these have been displaced and set to wandering after they made the mistake of
following the emigrant ships to this new land. They watched me, too, when I first arrived in Kellygnow.”
Bettina regarded her with interest. “What did they want?”
“I never asked, but what do men ever want? For a woman to forsake all and go running with them, out into the
wild. For us to lift our skirts and spread our legs for them.”