"Michael Flynn - The Promise Of God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flynn Michael)

"I know." Agnes paused and took a deep breath. "I waited until she left. I
addressed her yestere'en, but she laughed at me and said that my wereman and I
should wash ourselves and our clothing with lye soap and a stiff wire brush."

Nealy laughed. "Aye, by Hermes, that would work!" He felt the hammer in his
veins, the sudden, momentary distancing of his vision, and knew that the
scrubbing would work, better than Greta had supposed; but before he could tell
Agnes of his incontinent spelling, she spoke.

"But you could make it so the fleas would never return, so that Lucius and I 'ud
be clean for good and aye."

Nealy paused with his mouth half-open and pondered the additional requirement.
Now, that did put a different cast on things. There were any number of
alternatives. He closed his eyes to better envision them. Yes, four or five
possibilities, some of them quite amusing. And it made Alice's request so much
more interesting.

To ply the craeft, as all men knew, would nibble the soul away.

His parents had begun the search for a rixler that very evening. The priest had
come up from Lechaucaster, down by the forks of the river, where the chain dam
hoarded the headwaters for the southern canal. He had come up the mountainside
a-muleback and had tested Nealy with an ankh. It was stuffy in the close-bed
with the priest. The man stank with the sweat of his riding and his breath was
foul. Nealy remembered everything about that day with the clarity of a landmark
spied across miles of fog and mist.

Mama had cried. He remembered that, too.

"For a while yet, he may refrain," the priest said with a shaking head.
"Ynglings oft try to abstain; yet in the end, they cannot restrain themselves
and are drawn back to the Other Way in spite of everything."

His mother rose from the table and turned crossing her arms across herself-- and
Nealy drew back quickly in to the confines of the close-bed lest she see him.
But he leaned his head by the door so as to hear everything.



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"But Nealy is a good boy," she said. "And dweormen do much good in the world."

"Esther. . . " Papa's voice, warning.

"But only under the tutelage of a trained rixler," insisted the priest. "One who
may provide a soul for him when his craeft has eaten his own." Then he chanted
from the Gospel of Thomas: