"Patricia A. McKillip - The Old Woman and the Storm" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

THE OLD WOMAN AND THE STORM
by Patricia McKillip

THE SUN ROSE, as it did every day, making the birds squawk, painting the world. But this rising was
different. Arram sensed it as he stepped out of his house. His bare sole felt a newness. His eyes filled
with a memory of light. He stood still, watching the night melt away, and for just a moment, time enough
for the first warmth to touch his face, he knew that this was also the First Sunrise, when the Long Night
had ended and the world began to form. The sun had risen so. The earth was old-new underfoot.
Dreams and memories stirred in a breeze through the trees. Arram went for a walk in the new world.

The Sun, the painter, got out her paintbrushes of light. She drenched a bird in red and yellow as it
swooped by. She spattered purple among the berry bushes. She painted stones and reflections of stones
in the river. Arram passed his favorite rock, where he himself had painted his First Name. The Name had
come to him in a dream: the First Name which the being that breathed through his body and saw through
his eyes had called itself. Now it had Arram's name and voice. Arram had made a gift of the Name to the
rock. It slept so calmly in the water, massive and yellow, a dreaming giant. Other people had liked it also:
many pictures, gestures of affection, patterned its weathered sides.

Arram filled his belt-skin with water and turned away from the river. The flat earth, the Sun's domain,
spread before him in a thousand shades of brown. He faced the Sun, felt her pour hot dark color into his
hair, his body. Far away, another stone, huge and rounded with age, smoldered in the morning with a
glow like fire. It caught his eye, greeted him with the common greeting: the languageless, timeless memory
of the First Morning. Arram walked toward it.

A lizard scurried away from his foot. A hawk circled above him, then hurtled down, a fist of brown
plumage. It rose again with a snake in its talons. Minute red flowers swarmed across Arram's path.
Animal bones slowly buried themselves in the earth. Tracks of a live animal came across the desert,
crossed Arram's tracks, and went their own silent way. A cloud smudged the sky, and another. The Old
Woman who hated the Sun was smoking. The distant rock moved slightly closer to Arram. It had
changed color: the fire had melted into brass. Have I been to that rock before? Arram wondered. Or do
I only remember it from another time? Thoughts rambled pleasantly in his head; the world constantly
changed under his eye. Is this walk mine? Or am I remembering an earlier walk? He stopped for a
swallow of water. The ground simmered around him, blurred with light. The air droned and buzzed with
invisible singers. A shadow passed over him, and he looked up. The Old Woman was puffing clouds all
over the sky.

Arram walked on. When he grew hungry he killed a lizard and roasted it. The soul of the lizard went on
its own walk, searching for another container. The rock began to loom across the horizon, bigger than
Arram had thought. It darkened; the clouds were draining the Sun of color. The air was motionless,
moist-hot. If I remember the rock, I should remember reaching it, Arram thought. But I don't. So this
must be my own walk.

There was a fragment of red cloth on a thorn. Someone else had come that way and gone. In the dim,
steamy afternoon, the voice of the desert was a vibrant bass hum. The Sun managed a final angry shower
of light. She burned the cloud-edges of silver, struck sweat from Arram's face, turned the great wall of
rock orange. A shadow, black as night, fell across Arram's path and he stopped, as though he had
caught himself from stepping into a rift. He glanced up.Then down and up again. Someone lost a shadow,
he thought surprisedly. There was nothing, even in the sky, that it belonged to. As his eyes fell again to
the earth, a wind came up tasting of dust and rain, and sent the shadow tumbling across the desert like a
leaf.