"Jane Yolen - The Lady's Garden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

And the Lady? She was old but she never seemed to age. Except her eyes,
which were once the deep, rich blue of a Spring sky and were now faded like the
skies over Winter.

Now the way that trouble came to the garden was this. It was a small thin&
but the Lady should have known that small things carry the greatest dangers. Didn’t
a tiny viper bite the heel of the hero and bring him low? Didn’t ants tunnel through
the great walls of Cathay and grind whole sections to dust?

For the first time in years — in centuries, actually — there was a strange
sound outside one of the gates in the wall. Those gates, normally so overgrown with
bramble hedge and briar on the World’s side and so besieged by the Ocean on the
other, needed no guards or wards. In fact, the Lady and the unicorns scarcely
remembered from one year to the next that the gates existed. But this one lambent
spring day, right after the hour’s rain, there was something rather like the wailing of a
discontented child by the Northeastern gate. No, exactly like the wailing of a
discontented child. The wailing went on from the moment the rain ended until quite
past tea time, or about three hours. At that point, Infanta stomped three times with
her left fore foot and shook her head until the white mane flew about as light as
milkweed milk.

“What is that noise?” she asked.

Neither Tartary — who listened to the Lady — or Wishart — who listened
only to the sea — bothered to answer. But Infanta asked anyway. “It is louder than
grass growing. Louder than a gully full of Queen Anne’s Lace and campion. Louder
even than the bursting open of marigolds, which is very loud, indeed.” And she went
to complain directly to the Lady, who had heard the sound already.

“If I didn’t know any better,” said the Lady, “I would say it is a child -and a
very young child at that — lying in a reed basket washed up upon the Ocean’s small
shingle.” And because the Lady was blessed with a certain amount of prescience,
which is another way of saying she could see a bit into the future, Infanta knew
exactly what they would find.

The Lady sent one of her most trusted winds to leap over the wall and report
back. It was a very small wind, hardly more than a breeze, really. When it returned, it
reported in a voice made sweet with baby’s breath and tart with brine. “It is a very
young child lying in a basket.”
 “A reed basket,” the Lady said, a great deal of satisfaction in her voice.

“Well, nettles and linen, actually,” the breeze answered. Breezes, for all they
are lightweight, insist on being factual. It is the habit of preachers and politicians as
well.

The Lady made a face at the breeze. She hated making any kind of mistake.
But then she smiled at the breeze because it had, after all, merely been reporting, not
making judgments. And then the Lady instructed slightly larger breezes to waft their
gauzy shifts together and make a rope to hook through the handles of the basket. In