"Charles de Lint - Make a Joyiful Noise" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

Make a Joyful Noise
by
Charles de Lint
Part I
Every one thinks we’re sisters, but it’s not as simple as that. If I let my thoughts drift far enough back into
the long ago–the long long ago, before Raven stirred that old pot of his and poured out the stew of the
world–we were there. The two of us. Separate, but so much the same that I suppose we could have
been sisters. But neither of us remember parents, and don’t you need them to be siblings? So what
exactly our relationship is, I don’t know. We’ve never known. We just are. Two little mysteries that
remain unchanged while the world changes all around us.

But that doesn’t stop everyone from thinking they know us. In the Kickaha tradition we’re the tricksters
of their crow story cycles, but we’re not really tricksters. We don’t play tricks. Unless our trick is to look
like we’d play tricks, and then we don’t.

Before the Kickaha, the cousins had stories about us, too, though they were only gossip. Cousins don’t
buy into mythic archetypes because we all know how easy it is to have one attached to your name. Just
ask Raven. Or Cody.

But gossip, stories, anecdotes…everybody seems to have something to pass on when it comes to us.

These days it’s people like Christy Riddell that tell the stories. He puts us in his books–the way his
mentor Professor Dapple used to do, except Christy’s books are actually popular. I suppose we don’t
mind so much. It’s kind of fun to be in a story that anyone can read. But if we have to have a Riddell
brother in our lives, we’d much prefer it to be Geordie. There’s nothing wrong with Christy. It’s just that
he’s always been a bit stiff. Geordie’s the one who knows how to have fun and that’s why we get along
with him so well, because we certainly like to have fun.

But we’re not only about mad gallivanting and cartwheels and sugar.

And we’re not some single entity, either.

That’s another thing that people get wrong. They see the two of us as halves of one thing. Most of the
time they don’t even recognize us when they meet us on our own. Apart, we’re just like anybody else,
except we live in trees and can change into birds. But when you put the two of us together, everything
changes. We get all giddy and incoherence rules. It’s like our being near each other causes a sudden
chemical imbalance in our systems and it’s almost impossible to be anything but silly.

We don’t particularly mind being that way, but it does make people think they know just who and what
and why we are, and they’re wrong. Well, they’re not wrong when the two of us are together. They’re
just wrong for who we are when we’re on our own.

And then there are the people who only see us as who they want us to be, rather than who we really
are–though that happens to everybody, I suppose. We all carry around other people’s expectations of
who we are, and sometimes we end up growing into those expectations.

***

It was a spring day, late in the season, so the oaks were filled with fresh green foliage, the gardens
blooming with colour and scent, and most days the weather was balmy. Today was no exception. The