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

forward from the distaff, under my twisting fingers, toward the spindle. The straw,
straw still, broke and fell to the floor in a powder of chaff.
I tried again. And again. The shining wheel became covered with sticky bits of
straw, obscuring its brightness. The straw fell to the stone floor. It would not even
wind once around the spindle.
I screamed and kicked the spinning wheel. It fell over, hard. There was the sound
of splintering wood. "By God's blood," I shouted at the cursed thing, "damn you
for a demon!"
"If it were demonic, it would do you more good," a voice said quietly.
I whirled around. By the door sat the rat. He was a rat no longer but a short,
ratty-faced man, thin and starved-looking and very young, dressed in rags. I looked
at his eyes, pale brown and filmy, like the floating colors in dreams, and I knew
immediately that I was in the presence of one of the Old Ones.
Strangely, I felt no fear. He was so puny, and so pale. I could have broken his
arm with one hand. He wasn't even as old as I was, despite the downy stubble on his
chin—a boy, who had been a rat.
What danger could there be in magic that could not even free itself from a locked
room?
"You're not afraid," he said in that same quiet voice, and if I had been, the fear
would have left me then. He smiled, the saddest and most humble smile I have ever
seen. It curved his skinny mouth, but it never touched the washed-out brown of his
eyes. "You're a bold girl."
 "Like my mam," I said bitterly, before I knew I was going to. "Bold in
misfortune." Except, of course, that it wasn't her who would die a slow and painful
death, the lying bitch.
"I think we can help each other," he said, and at that I laughed out loud. I shudder
now, to remember it. I laughed aloud at one of the Old Ones! What stupidities we
commit from ignorance!
He gave me again that pitiful wraith of a smile. "Do you know, Ludie, what
happens when art progresses?"
I had no idea what we were talking about. Art? Did he mean magic arts? And how
did he know my name? A little cold prickle started in my liver, and I knew I wouldn't
laugh at him again.
"Yes, magic arts, too," he said in his quiet voice, "although I was referring to
something else. Painting. Sculpture. Poetry. Even tapestry—everything made of
words and colors. You don't weave tapestry, do you, Ludie?"
He knew I did not. Only ladies wove tapestries. I flushed, thinking he was
mocking me.
"Art starts out simple. Pale. True to what is real. Like stone statues of the human
body, or verse chanted by firelight. Pale, pale stone. Pale as straw. Simple words,
that name what is true. Designs in natural wool, the color of rams' horns. Then, as
time goes on, the design becomes more elaborate. The colors brighter. The story
twisted to fit rhyme, or symbol, or somebody else's power. Finally, the designs are
so elaborate, so twisted with motion, and the colors so feverish—look at me,
Ludie—that the original, the real as it exists in nature, looks puny and withered. The
original has lost all power to move us, replaced by a hectic simulacrum that bears
only a tainted relation to what is real. The corruption is complete."
He leaned forward. "The magic arts are like that, too, Ludie. The Old Ones, our
blood diluted by marriage with men, are like that now. Powerless in our bone-real
paleness, our simple-real words."