"Joanna Russ - Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

her rebellious girlhood, twenty years back, was a kind of joke
between us. "Don't you do it," she would tell me and we would
laugh together, I so heartily at the very idea of my being a pious
monk full of learning that I would hold my sides and be unable to
speak.
She was kind to everyone. She knew all the languages, not only
ours, but the Irish too and the tongues folk speak to the north and
south, and Latin and Greek also, and all the other languages in the
world, both to read and write. She knew how to cure sickness, both
the old women's way with herbs or leeches and out of books also.
And never was there a more pious woman! Some speak ill of her
now she's gone and say she was too merry to be a good Abbess, but
she would say, "Merriment is Gods flowers," and when the winter
wind blew her headdress awry and showed the gray hair—which
happened once; I was there and saw the shocked faces of the Sisters
with her—she merely tapped the band back into place, smiling and
saying, "Impudent wind! Thou showest thou hast power which is
more than our silly human power, for it is from God"—and this
quite satisfied the girls with her.
No one ever saw her angry. She was impatient sometimes, but in a
kindly way, as if her mind were elsewhere. It was in Heaven, I used
to think, for I have seen her pray for hours or sink to her knees—
right in the marsh!—to see the wild duck fly south, her hands
clasped and a kind of wild joy on her face, only to rise a moment
later, looking at the mud on her habit and crying half-ruefully, half
in laughter, "Oh, what will Sister Laundress say to me? I am

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hopeless! Dear child, tell no one; I will say I fell," and then she
would clap her hand to her mouth, turning red and laughing even
harder, saying, "I am hopeless, telling lies!"
The town thought her a saint, of course. We were all happy then, or
so it seems to me now, and all lucky and well, with this happiness
of having her amongst us burning and blooming in our midst like a
great fire around which we could all warm ourselves, even those
who didn't know why life seemed so good. There was less illness;
the food was better; the very weather stayed mild; and people did
not quarrel as they had before her time and do again now. Nor do I
think, considering what happened at the end, that all this was
nothing but the fancy of a boy who's found his mother, for that's
what she was to me; I brought her all the gossip and ran errands
when I could, and she called me Boy News in Latin; I was happier
than I have ever been.
And then one day those terrible, beaked prows appeared in our river.
I was with her when the warning came, in the main room of the
Abbey tower just after the first fire of the year had been lit in the
great hearth; we thought ourselves safe, for they had never been