"Kress, Nancy - Summer Wind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

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Summer Wind
by Nancy Kress
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Copyright (c)1995 Nancy Kress
First published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Avon, 1995

Fictionwise Contemporary
Fantasy


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Sometimes she talked to them. Which of course was stupid, since they could neither hear nor answer. She talked anyway. It made the illusion of company.
Her favorite to talk to was the stableboy, frozen in the stableyard beside the king's big roan, the grooming brush still in his upraised hand. The roan was frozen too, of course, brown eyes closed, white forelock blowing gently in the summer wind. She used to be a little frightened of the roan, so big it was, but not of the stableboy, who had had merry red lips and wide shoulders and dark curling hair.
He had them still.
Every so often she washed off a few of them: the stableboy, or the cook beside his pots, or the lady-in-waiting sewing in the solarium, or even the man and woman in the north bedchamber, locked in naked embrace on the wide bed. None of them ever sweated or stank, but still, there was the dust -- dust didn't sleep -- and after years and years the people became coated in fine, gray powder. At first she tried to whisk them clean with a serving maid's feather duster, but it was very hard to dust eyelashes and earlobes. In the end she just threw a pot of water over them. They didn't stir, and their clothes dried eventually, the velvets and silks a little stiff and water-marked, the coarse-weaved breeches and skirts of the servants none the worse off. Better, maybe. And it wasn't as if any of them would catch cold.
"There you are," she said to the stableboy. "Now, doesn't that feel better? To be clean?"
Water glistened in his black curls.
"I'm sure it must feel better."
A droplet fell onto his forehead, slid over his smooth brown cheeks, came to rest in the corner of his mouth.
"It was not supposed to happen this way, Corwin."
He didn't answer, of course. She reached out one finger and patted the droplet from his sleeping lips. She put the finger in her own mouth and sucked it.
"How many years was I asleep? How many?"
His chest rose and fell gently, regularly.
She wished she could remember the color of his eyes.
* * * *
A few years later, the first prince came. Or maybe it wasn't even the first. Briar Rose was climbing the steps from the cool, dark chambers under the castle, her spread skirt full of wheat and apples and cheese as fresh as the day they were stored. She passed the open windows of the Long Gallery and heard a tremendous commotion.
Finally! At last!
She dropped her skirts; wheat and apples rolled everywhere. Rose rushed through the Gallery and up the steps to her bedchamber in the highest tower. From her stone window she could just glimpse him beyond the castle wall, the moat, the circle of grass between moat and Hedge. He sat astride a white stallion on the far side of the Hedge, hacking with a long silver sword. Sunlight glinted on his blond hair.
She put her hand to her mouth. The slim white fingers trembled.
The prince was shouting, but wind carried his words away from her. Did that mean the wind would carry hers toward him? She waved her arms and shouted.
"Here! Oh, brave prince, here I am! Briar Rose, princess of all the realm! Fight on, oh good prince!"
He didn't look up. With a tremendous blow, he hacked a limb from the black Hedge, so thick and interwoven it looked like metal, not plant. The branch shuddered and fell. On the backswing, the sword struck smaller branches to the prince's right. They whipped aside and then snapped back, and a thorn-studded twig slapped the prince across the eyes and blinded him. He screamed and dropped his sword. The sharp blade caught the stallion in the right leg. It shied in pain. The blinded prince fell off, directly into the Hedge, and was impaled on thorns as long as a man's hand and hard as iron.
Rose screamed. She rushed down the tower steps, not seeing them, not seeing anything. Over the drawbridge, across the grass. At the Hedge she was forced to stop by the terrible thorns, as thick and sharp on this side as on the other. She couldn't see the prince, but she could hear him. He went on screaming for what seemed an eternity, although of course it wasn't.
Then he stopped.
She sank onto the green grass, sweet with unchanging summer, and buried her face in her apple-smelling skirts. Somewhere, faintly on the wind, she heard a sound like old women weeping.
* * * *
After that, she avoided all the east-facing windows. It was years before she convinced herself that the prince's body was, must be, gone from the far side of the Hedge. Even though the carrion birds did not stay for nearly that long.
Somewhere around the thirteenth year of unchanging summer, the second prince came. Rose almost didn't hear him. For months, she had rarely left her tower chamber. Blankets draped the two stone windows, darkening the room almost to blackness. She descended the stone steps only to visit the storage rooms. The rest of the long hours, she lay on her bed and drank the wine stored deep in the cool cellars under the castle. Days and nights came and went, and she lifted the gold goblet to her lips and let the red foregetfulness slide down her throat and tried not to remember. Anything.
After the first unmemoried months of this, she caught sight of herself in her mirror. She found another blanket to drape over the treacherous glass.
But stil the chamberpot must be emptied occasionally, although not very often. Rose shoved aside the blanket over the south window and leaned far out to dump the reeking pot into the moat far below. Her bleary eyes caught the flash of a sword.
He was red-headed this time, hair the color of warm flame. His horse was black, his sword set with green stones. Emeralds, perhaps. Or jade. Rose watched him, and not a muscle of her face moved.
The prince slashed at the Hedge, rising in his stirrups, swinging his mighty sword with both hands. The air rang with his blows. His bright hair swirled and leaped around his strong shoulders. Then his left leg caught on a thorn and the Hedge dragged him forward. The screaming started.
Rose let the edge of the blanket drop and stood behind it, the unemptied chamber pot splashing over her trembling hands. She thought she heard sobs, the dry juiceless sobs of the very old, but of course the chamber was empty.
* * * *