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

"I think you are completely capable of spinning straw into gold," he said. "In fact,
I expect you to have spun all the straw in this room into gold by morning."
"Then you expect the moon to wipe your ass!" I said, and immediately clapped
my hand over my mouth. Always, always my mouth brings me trouble. But he only
went on smiling, and it was then, for the first time, that I was afraid. Of that bright,
blue-eyed smile.
"If you don't spin it all into gold," he said silkily, "I will have you killed. But if you
do, I will marry you. There—that's a sweet inducement, is it not? A prince for a
husband for a girl like you. And for me—a wife with a dowry of endless golden
fingers."
I saw then, as if in a vision, his fingers endlessly on me, and at the expression on
my face his smile broadened.
"A slow death," he said, "and a painful one. But that won't happen, will it, my
magical spinster? You won't let it happen?"
"I cannot spin straw into gold!" I shouted, in a perfect frenzy of loathing and fear,
but he never heard me. A rat crept out from behind the bales and started across the
floor. The prince's face went ashen. In a moment he was gone, whirling through the
door and slamming it behind him before the rat could reach him. I heard the heavy
iron bar drop into its latch on the other side, and I turned to look at the foreign
spinning wheel, backed by bales to the rough beams of the ceiling.
My knees gave way and I sank down upon the straw.
There are so many slow and painful ways to die.
I don't know how long I shrank there, like some mewling and whimpering babe,
visioning horrors no babe ever thought of. But when I came back to myself, the rat
was still nosing at the door, trying to squeeze underneath. It should have fit; not even
our village rats are so thin and mangy. On hands and knees, I scuttled to join the rat.
Side by side we poked at the bottom of the door, the sides, the hinges.
It was all fast and tight. Not even a flea could have escaped.
Next I wormed behind the bales of straw, feeling every inch of the walls. They
were stone, and there were no chinks, no spaces made rotten by damp or moss.
This angered me. Why should the palace be the only sound stone dwelling in the
entire damp-eaten village? Even Jack Starling's father's mill had weak stones, damn
his crumbling grindstone and his scurrilous soul.
The ceiling beams were strong wood, holding up stronger, without cracks.
There were no windows, only light from candles in stone sconces.
The stone floor held no hidden trapdoors, nor any place to pry up the stone to
make a tunnel.
I turned to the spinning wheel. Under other circumstances I might have found it a
pretty thing, of polished wood. When I touched the wheel, it spun freely, revolving
the spindle much faster than even I, the best spinster in the village, could have done.
With such a thing, I could have spun thread seven times as fast. I could have
become prosperous, bought a new thatch roof for our leaky cottage, a proper bed
for my sodden father…
The rat still crouched by the door, watching me.
I fitted straw into the distaff. Who knew—the spinning wheel itself was from
some foreign place. "From the east," he'd said. Maybe the magic of the Old Ones
dwelt there, too, as well as in the west. Maybe the foreign wheel could spin straw.
Maybe it could even spin the stuff into gold. How would I, the daughter of a
drunkard and a lying braggart, know any different?
I pushed the polished wheel. It revolved the spindle, and the straw was pulled