"Bruce McAllister - The Lion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcallister Bruce)

THE LION
by Bruce McAllister

Bruce McAllister’s new short story collection from Golden Gryphon, The
Girl Who Loved Animals, will feature an introduction by Harry Harrison and
an afterword by Barry Malzberg. The book, which will include a few stories
that first saw publication in Asimov’s, will be out later this year. Its stories
cover the five decades—”from teenager through guy with more than half a
century under his expanding belt”—that Bruce has been writing and
publishing SF.

****

When the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen created the “Lion of Lucerne,” he was
inspired, he told friends, by a story he had heard as a child—a story about a lion,
a real lion, that had appeared miraculously in battle that terrible day in Paris in
1792 and fought so valiantly alongside the Swiss Guard, but whose body was
never found. “That creature has lived inside me,” he confessed. “It has haunted
my dreams.”
—Mythopoedia, “The Lion of Lucerne”
In August of that turbulent year, as France underwent its Revolution, the
insurrectionaries stormed the Palais des Tuileries where Louis XVI hid with his
family; and at this very moment were killing the Swiss Guards who had sworn to
protect the royal family with their lives. As the battle raged before the palace, a
lion—an actual lion—wounded, blinded by its own blood—dragged itself slowly
from the battlefield through the manicured gardens, collapsing in a tiny grotto hidden
by hedges and carved from limestone by an artisan whose name was already
forgotten.
For an instant, shimmering like a dream, the lion became a man, a big one, the
kind who might be a smithy or butcher, blinded by his own blood and dying too; but
then the man was a lion again, the nostrils flaring, the mane matted with blood and
the chest rattling with a growl it could not help. The change took no more than a
tortured moment and was like a spasm, as if God were unsure what the lion should
be this day.
The spear that had been driven through his back had broken off, with only a
piece remaining, but the pain was so great that man and lion both wondered if it
would ever end.
He could barely keep his eyes open, and his legs, heavy with the death of
others, sprawled beneath him, the hair on them curled with blood. Though he tried to
hold it up, his head dropped to his forepaws; and because blood filled his nostrils,
bubbling at each breath he took, he had to breathe through open jaws and could no
longer smell the carnage of the battlefield.
 Is it right, he wanted to ask, and, by wanting to, did, to kill if you kill for what
you love?
****
From the day he had had his first vision—of a wounded lion dying in a grotto
in a beautiful garden somewhere—Alain Sabatier had become fascinated with all
things leonine. He visited more than once the duke’s zoo in Arles, which had two
lions and was only two days’ travel from his village. In Arles’s shops he also found
charcoal drawings and fine etchings of lions, some anatomically correct, some not,