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

On the steep edge of the slope a stunted grove of red cedars leaned away from
the constant wind. When the girls ran in that direction, followed by Maggot,
his shoulder-length hair whipped by the hard breeze, Windy was relieved. She
could sniff the air and not smell wolves or other dangers in it.
Windy sniffed again, taking in the scent of the trees. Down in the valleys the
red cedars reached great heights, but here the tallest barely overtopped a
full-grown troll, although, thinking about it, that still made them the
tallest plant around. But they were twisted and deformed by the unrelenting
pressure of the constant wind, the west face naked and all their tattered
branches stretching east. On bad nights, the gusts could tumble trolls and
send them rolling across the bog.
Windy watched her son, his pale skin luminous in the partial moonlight. Her
son was also a creature from the valleys. She wondered what it would do to him
to grow up here in troll country, whether he'd end up deformed in some way
like the cedars.
Her mother climbed the rocks, sat down beside her, and pointed to the trees.
"Do you know what those look like?"
A trollbird settled on Windy's back and began picking nits off her skin. She
stayed still not to disturb it. "They smell like the big cedars that grow
farther down the slopes. I was just thinking about that."
"No, that's not it." Her mother stretched out a long arm, grabbed the branch
of a blueberry bush, and collected more of the juicy blue-black fruit. "They
look like the killing leaves."
Windy didn't know what her mother meant. "Killing leaves?"
"Once, there were many more trolls than there are now. Some of us lived in the
southern mountains then. When I was a young girl, I did." Windy had heard all
this before, and didn't care much for her mother's childhood stories. "There
were people, blackhairs, also living in the southern mountains then. Too many
to count or chase away, but they left us alone and we avoided them. Then other
people moved in, just like those who moved into the lower valleys here. The
two groups gathered together, against each other, in these big packs. Like
dyrewolves on the one side and the little bigtooth lions on the other."
Windy had never heard this story before. The trollbird skittered between her
shoulder blades. Her skin twitched.
"The two packs, they had these killing leaves," her mother made a three-sided
shape with her fingers, "big ones, one leaf on each tree. They carried them.
So we crept down out of the mountains to see them. One morning, before the Sun
came up, there were all these horns blowing. We hid in our caves all that day
but we couldn't sleep because we knew something was wrong. When we came back
to the field that night, it was littered with carrion. More dead men than
there are berries on these bushes, the smell so thick it made your stomach
swell, like to bursting. And the killing leaves in tatters, shredded, lying
this way and that, pieces shaking in the wind." She pointed to the cedars.
"They looked just like those trees."
Windy wished she'd never heard this story. "So?"
"People," her mother aimed her finger at Maggot, rolling around with the
girls, "did that. Afterward, the winners--the newcomers--came into the high
reaches and hunted us. We moved north, and once again men entered the low
valleys, and once again hunt us. They killed Mosswater, who was a fine troll
almost ready to father children."