"R. A. MacAvoy - L2 - King of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

had gone so far as to decide which room the baby would have. Like our own room, it had a private
garden.
I didn’t know who would take that room, or whether the others would use it to shit in now we were
gone.
The first day we woke up in the woods, I felt a peace of spirit I hadn’t known since before the morning in
March when two men leaped out of the shrubbery at me with razors in their hands. Even had we been
forced to flee into country strange to us, I doubt any Velonyan assassin could have dis-covered us, but
these woods were our own park, by law as well as usage, and were like rooms of our house in their.
familiarity. Last year, passing north from one market town to another, we had discovered a stand of vine
maple on an acre’s island in the stream that watered the oratory plantings, and I had braided a large
stand of branches into a living pavilion three or four feet off the black soil. This spring, upon settling into
the oratory, I rediscovered my architecture. All the braids had matured into elliocks, but that only added
to the concealment. I had scraped the dry leaves out and scattered theme into the stream, so that
movement within made no sound, and corrected the roofing, twig and lea& to minimize the effect of rain.
No boy of ten years could have enjoyed the making of a hidden fort more than I had, though I was
twenty-eight. When I was ten, there had been no op-portunity for fort-making.
Now Arlin lay upon the faded carpet I had brought from our own room, and the sunlight through the red
and green leaves of the maple ceiling gave the wool more exotic colors than it had ever known. Arlin’s
face, too, was a study of colored shadows, making it difficult for me to trace her expression.
“I had hoped to see your face in our baby,” she said, having said nothing since our dry breakfast.
I was very pleased to hear her talk, though she sounded very weary. “Then you have a broad range of
curiosity, or a broader sense of humor i” I answered her. “But I expect you will have that chance yet.
Why not?”
My question irritated her, and under the drifting lights of pink and green I saw an expression I recognized
well. “Nazhuret, that question displays the essential difference be-tween you and me. You wake up
thinking your heart’s desire may come today and I wake up wondering why a tidal wave has not washed
us all away ere now.”
She gave a great sigh and plucked a leaf out of the ceiling. “Why not? Because I do not conceive easily,
even before having an ax blow to the belly. Because you or I or both may be murdered at any moment.
Because there may come a plague. There are infinite ‘why nots.’ It’s a wonder I ever got a child started.”
I remained silent long enough so she would not think I dismissed her worries out of hand. “Yet I don’t
think mur—
derers will find us here, Arlin. I don’t think even hounds could track us over the running water. And as
for plagues—well, what’s the use of anticipating plagues?”
For perhaps a minute Arlin listened to the sounds: bird-song, the water, the hiss of leaf against leaf
“You’re right about, that, Nazhuret. About this concealment. Last year when we camped here, we were
unobtrusive, but there was the horse. Now we are simply invisible.”
I glanced out the hole in the shrubbery, small and at ground level, and thought no badger den was less
obvious. By the sounds she made and the bitter smell of leaf juice in the air I knew she had destroyed the
leaf in her hands.
“I miss her,” said Arlin. “I miss, Sabia very much. For a few days the loss of the baby overwhelmed that,
but I had Sabia with me for fourteen years.”
“She was a good horse,” I said, though I did not have Arlin’s educated appreciation for quality in the
beasts.
“She was a valuable horse, when I had nothing else val-uable. Three times I sold her, but I always got
her back.”
I almost asked Arlin whether “got her back” meant the same as “bought her back,” but I decided if Arlin
stole her own horse it was years ago and she was in no mood to be teased.
Still, I cannot hide my thoughts from her, even under a canopy of green and pink. “Once I stole her back,
and once I bought her back—you remember that time, for I returned in time to find you stuck between