"Clayton Emery - Robin & Marian - Floating Bread and Quicksilver" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

salt dried in salt pans during the winter, broached
them and crushed the white clumps with wooden
mallets. Girls returned from the woods with brush
hooks and saplings to repair the yards-long drying
racks. Then the first boats arrived, and women toted
the fillets and fish in wicker baskets, set to with
sharp knives at long plank tables.
They worked and sang and joked and gossiped of
wedding plans. It was common for betrothed to
marry after the herring season, when hands were
idle and dirty weather kept folk home. "Weddings
bring stormy weather," Marian was told a dozen
times. Brides chattered about plans for improving
homes and husbands while the matrons shook their
heads. Marian noted some needed little advice, for
their bellies were swollen from wintertime
assignations.
Unmarried girls took time to dig fat from under the
backbone of a proper herring, a glob of gooey silver,
and hurl it against a hut wall. If it stuck upright, they
were teased, their husband would be upright and
true, but if the fat clung crooked, so would their
husbands prove false.
The only ones quiet were Lucy and Zerlina, the new
widows. They grieved but worked, for no one stood
idle while the herring ran.
Yet one did. As Marian returned from the privy, she
noted a dark figure silhouetted against the gray sky.
The woman walked the bushy cliffs and lumpy
headlands north of the village, where the tide
smashed to spray on rocks.
Marian stood by Sidony, grabbed a fish and a knife,
set to slicing. She nodded south. "Who's that? Why
doesn't she help?"
Sidony answered without looking. "That'd be
Mornat. She don't associate."
"Mornat?" said Marian. "What a queer name. What
does it mean?"
"S'a queer woman. The priest named her after
cutting her from her dead mother. It means 'living
from the dead' or somewhat. A posthumous child.
So she has the second sight, and can heal with her
touch."
Marian touched up a blade, sliced off the hundredth
staring head of the day. Her calloused hands were
pruney and blue. "Why doesn't she associate?"
"She's queer, is all. We go to her when we need
potions and such. The rest of the time she's off
wandering the cliffs and sea caves, or walking to
Hull for her nostrums. We don't keep track of her