"Robin McKinley - A Pool in the Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

A Pool in the Desert



Robin McKinley
 Robin McKinley was born in Ohio and grew up all over the world because her father was
in the army. She now lives in the south of England with her husband, writer Peter Dickinson.
She is the author of several fantasy novels published for young adults but loved by readers
of all ages, including Beauty, Rose Daughter, The Blue Sword (a Newbery Honor Book), and
The Hero and the Crown (winner of the Newbery Medal). Her most recent novel is
Spindle's End, based on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. McKinley's short fiction has been
published in The Door in the Hedge, A Knot in the Grain, and Water: Tales of Elemental
Spirits. The latter volume is the first book in a projected series based on the four
elements, written in collaboration with her husband.
"A Pool in the Desert" first appeared in Water. The story is loosely connected to
McKinley's "Damar" novels (The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown), though readers
needn't be familiar with Damar to enjoy this fine work of traditional fantasy.
—T. W.
 There were no deserts in the Homeland. Perhaps that was why she dreamed of deserts.
She had had her first desert dreams when she was quite young, and still had time to read
storybooks and imagine herself in them; but deserts were only one of the things she
dreamed about in those days. She dreamed about knights in armour and glorious quests,
and sometimes in these dreams she was a knight and sometimes she was a lovely lady who
watched a particular knight and hoped that, when he won the tournament, it would be she
to whom he came, and stooped on bended knee, and… and sometimes she dreamed that she
was a lady who tied her hair up and pulled a helmet down over it and over her face, and won
the tournament herself, and everyone watching said, Who is that strange knight? For I
have never seen his like. After her mother fell ill and she no longer had time to read, she
still dreamed, but the knights and quests and tournaments dropped out of her dreams, and
only the deserts remained.

For years in these desert dreams she rode a slender, graceful horse with an arched
neck, and it flew over the sand as if it had wings; but when she drew up on the crest of a
dune and looked behind her, there would be the shallow half-circles of hoofprints following
them, hummocking the wind-ridges and bending the coarse blades of the sand-grass. Her
horse would dance under her, splashing sand, and blow through red nostrils, asking to gallop
on, but she would wait for the rest of her party, less wonderfully mounted, toiling behind
her. Then she would turn again in the direction they were all going, and shade her eyes with
one hand, talking soothingly to her restless horse through the reins held lightly in the other;
and there would be the dark shadow of mountains before her, mountains she knew to call
the Hills.

As the years passed, however, the dreams changed again. She left school at sixteen
because her parents said they could spare her no longer, with her mother ill and Ruth and
Jeff still so little and her father and Dane (who had left school two years before) working
extra hours in the shop because the specialists her mother needed were expensive. When
Mrs. Halford and Mr. Jonah came to visit them at home (repeated efforts to persuade her
parents to come into the school for a meeting having failed), and begged them to
reconsider, and said that she was sure of a scholarship, that her education would be no
burden to them, her mother only wept and said in her trembling invalid voice that she was a