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

She lost a year. Or maybe more than a year; she couldn't be sure. There was only the accumulation of dust to go by, thick on the Gallery floor, thick on the sleeping bodies. A year's worth of drifting dust.
When she came again to herself, she lay outside, on the endlessly green summer grass. Her naked body was covered with scars. She walked, dazed, through the castle. Clothes on the sleepers had been slashed to ribbons. Mutilated doublets, breeches, sleeves, redingotes, kirtles. Blood had oozed from exposed shoulders and thighs where the knife had cut too deep, blood now dried on the sleeping flesh. In the north bedchamber, the long tumbled hair of the woman had been hacked off, her exposed scalp clotted with blood, her lips still smiling as she slept in her lover's arms.
Rose stumbled, hand to her mouth, to the stableyard. Corwin sat beside the big roan, black curls unshorn, tunic unslashed. Beside him, ripped and bloody, lay Rose's own dress, the blue dress with pink forget-me-nots she had worn for the ball on her sixteenth birthday.
She buried it, along with all the other ruined clothing and the bloody rags from washing the clotted wounds, in a deep hole beside the Hedge.
On the wind, old women keened.
Although the spinning wheel was heavy, she dragged it down the tower stairs to the Long Gallery. For a moment she looked curiously at the sharp needle, but for only a moment. The storage rooms held wool and flax, bales of it, quintals of it. There were needles and thread and colored ribbon. There were wooden buttons, and jeweled buttons, and carved buttons of a translucent white said to be the teeth of far-away animals large enough to lay siege to a magic Hedge. Briar Rose knew better, but she took the white buttons and smoothed them between her fingers.
She weaved and sewed and embroidered new clothes for every sleeper in the castle, hundreds of people. Pages and scullery maids and mummers and knights and ladies and the chapel priest and the king's fool, for whom she made a parti-colored doublet embroidered with small sharp thorns. She weaved clothes for the chancellor and the pastry chef and the seneschal and the falconer and the captain of the guards and the king and queen, asleep on their thrones. For herself Rose weaved a simple black dress and wore it every day. Sometimes, tugging a chemise or kirtle or leggings over an unresisting sleeping body, she almost heard voices on the summer breeze. Voices, but no words.
She spun and weaved and embroidered sixteen hours a day, for years. She frowned as she worked, and a line stitched itself across her forehead, perpendicular to the lines in her neck. Her golden hair fell forward and interferred with the spinning and so she bound it into a plait, and saw the gray among the gold, and shoved the plait behind her back.
She had finished an embroidered doublet for a sous-cook and was about to carry it to the kitchen when she heard a great noise without the walls.
Slowly, with great care, Rose laid the sous-cook's doublet neatly on the polished Gallery floor. Slowly, leaning against the stone wall to ease her arthritic left knee, she climbed the circular stairwell to her bedchamber in the tower.
He attacked the Hedge from the northwest, and he had brought a great retinue. At least two dozen young men hacked and slashed, while squires and pages waited behind. Flags snapped in the wind; horses pawed the ground; a trumpet blared. Rose had no trouble distinguishing the prince. He wore a gold circlet in his glossy dark hair, and the bridle of his golden horse was set with black diamonds. His sword hacked and slashed faster than the others', and even from the high tower, Rose could see that he smiled.
She unfurled the banner she had embroidered, fierce yellow on black, with the two curt words: BE GONE! None of the young men looked up. Rose flapped the banner, and a picture flashed through her mind, quick as the prince's sword: her old nurse, shaking a rug above the moat, freeing it of dust.
The prince and his men continued to hack at the Hedge. Rose called out -- after all, she could hear them, should they not be able to hear her? Her voice sounded thin, pale. She hadn't spoken in years. The ghostly words disappeared in the other voices, the wordless ones on the summer wind. No one noticed her.
The prince fell into the Hedge, and the screaming began, and Rose bowed her head and prayed for them, the lost souls, the ones for whom she would never spin doublets or breeches or whispered smiles like the one on the woman with hacked-off hair asleep in her shared bed in the north chamber.
Her other dead.
* * * *
After years, decades, everyone in the castle was clothed, and dusted, and pillowed on embroidered cushions rich with intricate designs in jewelled-colored thread. The pewter in the kitchen gleamed. The wooden floor of the Long Gallery shone. Tapestries hung bright and clean on the walls.
Rose no longer sat at the spinning wheel. Her fingers were knotted and twisted, the flesh between them thin and tough as snakeskin. Her hair, too, had thinned but not toughened, its lustrous silver fine as spun flax. When she brushed it at night, it fell around her sagging breasts like a shower of light.
Something was happening to the voices on the wind. They spun their wordless threads more strongly, more distinctly, especially outside the castle. Rose slept little now, and often she sat in the stableyard through the long unchanging summer afternoon, listening. Corwin slept beside her, his long lashes throwing shadows on his downy cheeks. She watched him, and listened to the spinning wind, and sometimes her lined face turned slowly in a day-long arc, as if following a different sun than the one that never moved.
"Corwin," she said in her quavery voice, "did you hear that?"
The wind hummed over the cobblestones, stirred the forelock of the sleeping roan.
"There are almost words, Corwin. No, better than words."
His chest rose and fell.
"I am old, Corwin. Too old. Princes are much younger men."
Sunlight tangled in his fresh black curls.
"They aren't really supposed to be words. Are they."
Rose creaked to her feet. She walked to the stableyard well. The oak bucket swung suspended from its windlass, empty. Rose put a hand on the winch, which had become very hard for her twisted hands to turn, and closed her eyes. The wind spun past her, then through her. Her ears roared. The bucket descended of itself, filled with water. Cranked back up. Rose opened her eyes.
"Ah," she said quietly. And then, "So."
The wind blew.
She hobbled through the stableyard gate to the Hedge. One hand she laid on it, and closed her eyes. The wind hummed in her head, barely rustling the summer grass.
When she opened her eyes, nothing about the Hedge had changed.
"So," Rose said, and went back into the bailey, to dust the royal guard.
But each day she sat in the the wordless wind, or the wind whose words were not what mattered, or in her own mind. And listened.
* * * *
No prince had arrived for decades. A generation, Rose decided; a generation who knew the members of the retinue led by the young royal on the black horse. But that generation must grow older, and marry, and give birth to children, and one day a trumpet sounded and men shouted and banners snapped in the wind.
It took Rose a long time to climb the tower staircase. Often she paused to rest, leaning against the cool stone, hand pressed to her heart. At the top she paused again, to look curiously around her old room, the one place she never cleaned. The bedclothes lay dirty and sodden on the stained floor. Rose picked them up, folded them across the bed, and hobbled to a stone window.
The prince had just begun to hack at the Hedge. He was the handsomest one yet: hair and beard of deep burnished bronze, dark blue doublet strained across strong shoulders, silver fittings on epaulets and sash. Rose's vision had actually improved with age; she could see his eyes. They were the green of stained-glass windows in bright sun.
She knew better, now, than to call to him. She stared at his hacking and slashing, at the deadly Hedge, and then closed her eyes. She let the wind roar in her ears, and through her head, and into the places that had not existed when she was young. Not even when she heard him scream did she open her eyes.
But finally, when the screams stopped as quickly as they had come, she leaned through the tower window and scanned the ground far below. The prince lay on the trampled grass, circled by kneeling, shouting men. Rose watched him wave them away, rise unsteadily, and remount his horse. She saw the horrified gaze he bent upon the Hedge.
Later, after they had all ridden away, she made her way back down the steps, over the drawbridge, across the grass to the Hedge. It loomed as dark, as thick, as impenetrable as ever. The black thorns pointed in all directions, in and out, and nothing she could do with the wind could change them at all.
* * * *
But then, one day, the Hedge melted.
Rose was very old. Her silver plait had become a bother and she'd cut it, trimming her hair into a neat white cap. There were ten hairs on her chin, which sometimes she remembered to pull out and sometimes she didn't. Her body had gone skinny as a bird's, with thin bird bones, except for a soft rounded belly that fluttered when she snored. The arthritis in her hands had eased and they, too, were skinny, long darting hands, worn and capable as a spinning shuttle. Her sunken blue eyes spun power.
She was sitting on the unchanging grass when she heard the tumult behind the Hedge. Creakily she rose to start for the tower. But there was no need. Before her eyes the black thorns melted, running into the ground like so much dirty water from washing the kitchen floor. And then the rest of the Hedge melted. Beside her a sleeping groom stirred, and beside the drawbridge, another.
The prince rode through the dissolving Hedge as if it had never been. He had brown hair, gold sash, a chestnut horse. As he dismounted, the solid mass of muscle in his thighs shifted above his high polished boots.
"The bedchamber of the princess -- where is it?"
Rose pointed at the highest tower.
He strode past her, trailed by his retinue. When the last squire had crossed the drawbridge, Rose followed.
All was commotion. Guards sprang forward, found themselves dressed in embroidered velvet, and spun around, bewildered, drawn swords in their hand. Ladies bellowed for pages. The falconer dashed from the mews, wearing a doublet of white satin slashed over crimson, the peregrine on his wrist fitted with gold-trimmed jesses with ivory bells.
Rose hobbled to the stableyard. The king's roan pawed and snorted. Men ran to and fro. A serving wench lowered the bucket into the well, on her head a coif sewn with gold lace.