"Jay Lake - The Angel's Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

The Angel's Daughter

by Jay Lake


Listen, everyone understands that an angel's merest fingernail paring is more beautiful than the fairest
princess. Even the camels know that the hairs caught in an angel's brush are more lovely than all the
Queens of Air and Darkness. Imagine then how exquisite the angel's daughter was, born of that holy
beauty to live upon this earth. If you can imagine it, so could every prince and satrap from here to
Samarkand and back again.

Far away in the Western Desert, hidden among the high crests of the Dune Sea, there lies a city encircled
by an alabaster wall. That wall goes down to bedrock, and rises high to the sky, so smooth not even a fly
could land upon it. There is only one gate in the wall, so small that a grown man must bend nearly double
to pass through it, of ebony wood secured with a great, golden lock. Inside the city there is a palace of
crystal towers. In the tallest tower there lives the angel's daughter. Hidden deep inside her heart is the
golden key to the lock. The prophets have declared the man who could pass the gate would have her
heart, and the man who had her heart could pass the gate.

Suitors both great and powerful came to the alabaster city. They marched with armies and flew on the
backs of rocs. Their elephants carried teak battering rams, their soldiers drove gangs of condemned
prisoners to build high ramps of sand and stone.

But the prophecies are not so easily cheated. The elephants died of thirst, and the prisoners revolted.
Teak split in the heat and the rocs came down with bird mites the size of badgers. Armies wandered
under the brassy sun until the sands swallowed them up.

Clever men brought thieves, but the walls were too smooth to climb. Determined men brought miners,
but the walls were too deep to delve. Wise men brought kites, but the walls were too high to overfly.
One crafty prince even brought bundles of reeds on the back of a thousand porters, intending to join
them with linen rags infused with gum arabic. It was his plan to pipe in water from the distant sea and
make the desert around the City of the Angel's Daughter a sparkling lake, and sail onward to capture her
heart. Sadly, he drowned in a rain barrel upon the back of one of his camels — the only man to die so in
a desert — and his porters were eaten by lions.

One lad alone from that caravan righteously observed the daily prayers of Fajr, Maghrib and Isha, even
while being stalked. The great cats of the desert spared the lad because of his piety, and he finally
reached the alabaster city with a bundle of reeds on his back and goatskin of wine at his belt. He had
seven figs and a date in his wallet, and some of his wits about him. He was small, so the gate seemed of a
size to him. He was poor, and thus was used to making do. His only ambitions were to live another day
and be free of foolish, prideful princes. He had achieved the latter ambition, apparently at the expense of
the former.

The resourceful lad knelt at the little gate and peered through the keyhole in the golden lock. Inside the
city he saw the crystal towers, small djinns of dust dancing before them. As he stared, the angel's
daughter chanced to pass higher up in the towers, casting her shadow within his sight. The lad was struck
dumb with the beauty of her mere silhouette on the sand. With the practicality of the poor, he also
reasoned that such an exquisite creature living here in the desert must have food and water and shelter,
which he might share after making a guest-offering of his mite of food and wine. Many men had tried to
pass the gate, but had any man first touched her heart?