"Eric Flint - [Grantville 04] - 1634 The Ram Rebellion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Eric)

PART I:
RECIPES FOR REVOLUTION
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me
down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very
many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I
answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.”

Ezekiel 37:1-3




Cook Books
Eric Flint

June, 1631

After Melissa Mailey ushered Mike Stearns into her living room and took a seat on an armchair facing
him, she lifted her eyebrows. The expression on her face was one that Mike still remembered from years
earlier, when he’d been a high school student and Melissa had been the most notorious teacher in the
high school.

Which she still was, for that matter.

For the adult population of Grantville, Melissa’s notoriety stemmed from her radical political opinions.
For her students, however, that notoriety had an entirely different basis. Whatever flamboyantly
egalitarian views Ms. Mailey entertained regarding society as a whole, there was not a shred of evidence
for them in her classrooms.

The students who thought she was basically okay—Mike himself had been one of them—called her
eitherThe Schoolmarm from Hell orMelissa the Hun. Behind her back, of course. The terms used by
other students went downhill from there. Very rapidly downhill, in many cases.

Granted, all of her students would admit that she was fair. Butfair is not actually a virtue admired in a
schoolteacher, by her students, especially when it was almost impossible to slide anything by her.

Merciful, yes;easy-going , yes;absent-minded , best of all.

Fair, no.

As one of Mike’s schoolmates had grumbled to him at the time, “Who cares if she’s ‘fair’?” The boy
pointed an accusing finger at the book open before him on the cafeteria table. “So she’s making all of us
read this crap, equally and with no favoritism. Gee, ain’t that great?”

Mike grimaced. The volume in question was Dante’sInferno, a book he had soon come to detest
himself. Ms. Mailey’s notions of “suitable reading” for teenagers bore no relationship at all to what
teenagers thought themselves.

“’Fair,’” his friend continued remorselessly, the accusing finger still rigid. “Sure she is. Just like Satan
himself, in this miserable book.”