"Charles Coleman Finlay - A Democracy of Trolls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finley Charles Coleman)

"Not until the pears get ripe," said Ragweed, pushing aside the brush in his
hurry to hide. He squeezed his huge bulk through the narrow crack, then rolled
over on his back and rubbed his big round belly. "The trees full of pears and
nobody to eat them but us. I don't want to miss that! They won't be eating any
pears back home."
"That's a long time from now," she said, squeezing in after him. "What are we
going to eat until then?"
He bared his teeth in a half-grin. "I don't know about you, but I'm hungry for
a little maggot."
She turned her back to him and wrapped her arms around the sleeping child.
"YOU AREN'T going to keep it, are you?"
"Him, not it, mother," Windy answered through a mouth full of blueberries. Her
large fingers circled the branches, scooping off another bunch of ripe fruit
while her mother did the same beside her. The older troll's downy white hair
contrasted sharply with her gray skin in the moonlight. "And yes," Windy said,
"I am going to keep him."
"We'd heard tales, from Crash, when he went down into the people valleys last
year, but I didn't believe him. And then you finally return with it." She
frowned.
Windy looked across the bog. Her little boy played in the scrub grass with two
little girls his own age but twice his size. Sometimes she scarcely believed
it herself.
"Four winters, five summers," her mother said, reproach in her voice. "It's a
long time to be away, even if you were ashamed."
"I'm not ashamed." She shoved the blueberries in her mouth and chewed. "We
were going to come back that first winter, but the baby --"
"Maggot," her mother interrupted.
She swallowed. "That's what Ragweed calls him."
"I know. He's been telling everyone, but we'd already heard it from Crash. So
what do you call it?"
Windy had called the baby by her daughter's name for nearly a year but the boy
never answered to it, maybe because she only whispered it to him in his sleep.
And then Ragweed called him Maggot so often that it was the only name her boy
responded to. She sighed. "Maggot."
Her mother made a rumbling hum in her throat. She plucked the berries off the
branches one by one, filling her cupped hand. "Forty-one, forty-two,
forty-three for a handful. I can still count higher than anyone else. And
faster too. Heh! So that first winter?"
"Terrible." Windy wanted to explain how she tried to leave Ragweed but
couldn't, how there was never a good time to sneak away, not so he wouldn't
notice. "It was terrible."
"Why?"
"Before winter even, the baby grew so cold. His skin turned all blue at
night." She shivered. That winter bloomed into another summer before she found
the courage to take her frail child among the icy peaks, and while they hunted
food night to night and fattened up again, that summer rotted into winter, and
before she knew it four years had passed by as swift as midsummer nights. "So
we stayed down in the warmer valleys."
"You should have let it die."
"Him, mother."