"Nancy Kress - Words Like Pale Stones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

Words Like Pale Stones
Nancy Kress
THE GREENWOOD GREW LESS GREEN AS WE TRAVELED west.
Grasses lay flatter against the earth. Brush became skimpy. Trees withered, their bare
branches like crippled arms against the sky. There were no flowers. My stolen horse,
double-laden but both of us so light that the animal hardly noticed, picked his way
more easily through the thinning forest. Once his hooves hit some half-buried stone
and sparks struck, strange pale fire slow to die away, the light wavering over the
ground as if alive. I shuddered and looked away.
But the baby watched the sparks intently, his fretful body for once still in the
saddle. I could feel his sturdy little back pressed against me. He was silent, although
he now has a score of words, "go" and "gimme" and "mine!" that ordinarily he uses
all day long. I couldn't see his face, but I knew how his eyes would look: wide and
blue and demanding, beautiful eyes under thick black lashes. His father's eyes,
recognizing his great-great-grandfather's country.
It is terrible for a mother to know she is afraid of her infant son.


I could have stabbed the prince with the spindle from the spinning wheel. Not as
sharp as a needle, perhaps, but it would have done. Once I had used just such a
spindle on Jack Starling, the miller's son, who thought he could make free with me,
the daughter of a village drunkard and a washerwoman whose boasting lies were as
much a joke as her husband's nightly stagger. I have the old blood in me. My father
was a lord! My grandmother could fly to the moon! And, finally, My daughter
Ludie is such a good spinster she can spin straw into gold!
"Go ahead and spin me," Jack leered when he caught me alone in our hovel. His
hands were hot and his breath foul. When he pushed both against my breasts, I
stabbed him with the spindle, square in the belly, and he doubled over like scythed
hay. The spindle revolved in a stone whorl; I bashed him over the head with that and
he went down, crashing into the milk pail with a racket like the end of the world. His
head wore a bloody patch, soft as pulp, for a month.
But there was no stone whorl, no milk bucket, no foul breath in the palace. Even
the spinning was different. "See," he said to me, elegant in his velvets and silks, his
clean teeth gleaming, and the beautiful blue eyes bright with avarice, "it's a spinning
wheel. Have you ever seen one before?"
"No," I said, my voice sounding high and squeaky, not at all my own. Straw
covered the floor, rose to the ceiling in bales, choked the air with chaff.
"They're new," he said. "From the east." He lounged against the door, and no
straw clung to his doublet or knee breeches, slick with embroidery and jewels. "They
spin much faster than the hand-held distaff and spindle."
"My spindle rested in a whorl. Not in my hand," I said, and somehow the words
gave me courage. I looked at him straight, prince or no prince. "But, my lord, I'm
afraid you've been misled. My mother… says things sometimes. I cannot spin straw
into gold. No mortal could."
He only smiled, for of course he was not mortal. Not completely. The old blood
ran somewhere in his veins, mixed but there. Fevered and tainted, some said. Only
the glimmerings of magic were there, and glimmerings without mastery were what
made the cruelty. So I had heard all my life, but I never believed it—people will, after
all, say anything—until I stood with him in that windowless room, watching his smile
as he lounged against the door, chaff rising like dusty gold around me.