"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

maintained her mental balance by the narrowest margin.

The Student.

The Nightingale, for love of The Student, makes a Red Rose. An odious liquid was burning in her throat,
but she couldn't swallow.

Gradually she forced herself into awareness of a twisted sardonic mouth framed between aquiline nose
and jutting chin. The face, plastered as it was by white powder, had revealed no distinguishing features
beyond its unusual size. Much of the brow was obscured by the many tassels dangling over the front of
his travestied mortar-board cap. Perhaps the most striking thing about the man was not his face, but his
body. It was evident that he had some physical deformity, to outward appearances not unlike her own.
She knew intuitively that he was not a true hunchback. His chest and shoulders were excessively broad,
and he seemed, like her, to carry a mass of superfluous tissue on his upper thoracic vertebrae. She
surmised that the scapulae would be completely obscured.

His mouth twisted in subtle mockery. "Bell said you'd come." He bowed and held out his right hand.

"It is very difficult for me to dance," she pleaded in a low hurried voice. "I'd humiliate us both."
"I'm no better at this than you, and probably worse. But I'd never give up dancing merely because
someone might think I look awkward. Come, we'll use the simplest steps."

There was something harsh and resonant in his voice that reminded her of Matt Bell. Only...Bell's voice
had never set her stomach churning.

He held out his other hand.

Behind him the dancers had retreated to the edge of the square, leaving the center empty, and the first
beats of her music from the orchestra pavilion floated to her with ecstatic clarity.

Just the two of them, out there...before a thousand eyes...

Subconsciously she followed the music. There was her cue—the signal for the Nightingale to fly to her
fatal assignation with the white rose.

She must reach out both perspiring hands to this stranger, must blend her deformed body into his equally
misshapen one. She must, because he was The Student, and she was The Nightingale.

She moved toward him silently and took his hands.

As she danced, the harsh-lit street and faces seemed gradually to vanish. Even The Student faded into the
barely perceptible distance, and she gave herself up to The Unfinished Dream.

Chapter Three
She dreamed that she danced alone in the moonlight, that she fluttered in solitary circles in the moonlight,
fascinated and appalled by the thing she must do to create a Red Rose. She dreamed that she sang a
strange and magic song, a wondrous series of chords, the song she had so long sought. Pain buoyed her
on excruciating wings, then flung her heavily to earth. The Red Rose was made, and she was dead.

She groaned and struggled to sit up.