"Anthony Piers - Incarnations 3 - With a Tangled Skien" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

ding giftЧand slept on the bed. Young Cedric lay beside
the hearth, where there was dwindling radiation from the
embers. As the quiet chill of the night intensified, neither
stirred.

So they spent their nuptial night, the woman and the
boy, in silent isolation. In the morning Cedric got up,
stoked the ashes in the fireplace, and went out to relieve
himself and fetch more wood. Niobe woke to the sound
of an axe splitting billets of wood. It was a good sound,
for the morning air was chill indeed; soon there would be
physical warmth.

Or would there? She remembered that a fireplace was
an ineffective way to heat a house. A good stove put six
times as much heat into the surrounding air for the same




4 With a Tangled Skein

amount of wood burned. There was a stove here; she
would see to it. She might not be a genius, but she was
practical when it suited her purpose. For one thing, she
needed warm hands to operate her loom properly.

She wrapped her coat about her nightrobe and went out
to use the outhouse. There was an old catalog beside the
wooden seat, half-used, and a bucket of ashes. It was an
efficient system, she reflected, for this was the classic
place for reflection; one could read each page of the cat-
alog before using it, or simply stare at the pictures. The
mind was edified while the body was cleaned. The ashes
were to sprinkle over the refuse, cutting down on the
smell, and of course there was a ready supply of them at
the house. The refuse was periodically toted to the garden
for compost. It was an old-fashioned system, but a good
one; nothing, really, was wasted. Still, she would have
preferred a modern city toilet.

She emerged in due course, shivering in the cold, but
she paused to watch Cedric at work. He was not cold at
all; the effort of splitting heated him. She had to admit he
was good at it; he set each billet of wood on the chopping
block and halved it cleanly with a single blow of the axe,
so that the pieces toppled to either side. He was a boyЧ
but a big boy, with a fine ripple of muscle as he swung
the axe. His blond hair jumped as the axe struck, and a
muscle in his cheek tightened momentarily. A bonnie boy,