"Gregory Feeley - Fancy Bread" - читать интересную книгу автора (Feeley Gregory)

FANCY BREAD by Gregory Feeley

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The ogre lifts his rockslide face and sniffs, cavernous nostrils distending. With a
howl of rage—Jack can whiff his breath from where he hides—he stamps the
tree-wide floorboards and cries out in a bowel-solving roar:

****

Fee, fye, fo, fum!

I smell the Blod of an Englysshman!

Be he quicke or be he dede,

I’ll grinde his Bones to make my Brede!

****

Behind the oven grate, Jack feels his shanks quiver as though struck free from
his spine. Wolves came down once from the hills and snatched a village child, and
crows pluck corses on the gibbet; but never did Jack imagine that his end might be
another’s maw. It is a terror beyond reckoning: his sweet flesh guttled like dough.

The ogre’s goodwife assures him that what he smells is simply the remains of
the boy he ate yesterday. Jack squitters in terror but the ogre seems mollified, for he
sits down to be served a tremendous meal. The broth he slurps reeks of a mutton
unknown to Jack’s nose, and his stomach clenks at his mouth’s watering. The ogre
calls for a loaf, and when he sops then cracks loudly, Jack knows what he is
crunching.

The din allows Jack to shift his cramped feet, stirring wisps of ankle-high ash
which conceals hard lumps that bump his toes like riverstones. At last he sinks
aching to his hams, and in the humdrum of the ogre’s guzzling—even terror sates
with surfeit—he nudges one of the lumps and discovers it an unrelieved crust. Jack
brushes away bits of ash with wonder: the ogre, strong enough to disjoint him like a
hen, owns no leaven.

Barrels of ale sluice the ogre’s gullet as Jack squats in a plague pit of bones
and ash. He cradles a rock of grain, pitiful weapon, and wonders at its coarseness. A
memory stirs from childhood, the voice of traveling player declaiming on market
day:

—
 Tell me, where is fancy bread,

Or in the heart, or in the head?

—