"Beagle, Peter S - 1993 - The Innkeeper's Song" - читать интересную книгу автора (Beagle Peter S)

was a baker as well as a miller, which was a convenience, and just enough
leisure time to inspire enough disagreement to produce two separate churches.
And the bark of a certain tree, which grew only in that region, broke fevers
when steeped into tea, and could be shaved and pounded to make a dye like green
shadows.
In the village there were two children, a boy and a girl, born just hours apart,
who grew up loving each other and were promised to marry in the spring of their
eighteenth year. But the rains were long that year, and the spring was late in
coming, and there was even ice on the river, which was a thing that only
grandparents could recall. So when the warm weather came at last, the two lovers
walked out on the little bridge below the mill, where they had not gone for
almost half a year. The afternoon sun made them blink and shiver, and they
talked about weaving, which was the boyТs trade, and about who would not be
invited to their wedding.
The girl fell into the river that day. The winter rains had rotted a long
stretch of the railing where she leaned, laughing, and it crumpled under her
weight and the water lunged up to her. She had time to catch her breath, but no
time to scream.
Few in the village could swim, but the boy could. He was in the water before her
head came to the surface, and for one moment her arm was around him, his face
one last time pressed breathlessly against hers. Then a tumbling log took him
away from her, and when he gained the shore she was gone. The river had
swallowed her as easily as it had the little stones they had been skipping from
the bridge, a life ago.
Every soul in the village turned out to hunt for her. The men took their dugouts
and coracles and poled slowly back and forth across the river all that day, like
sad dragonflies. The women toiled along both banks with fish nets, and all but
the youngest children splashed in the shallows, chanting the rhymes all of them
knew to make a drowned body float to shore. But they never found her, and when
the night came they went back to their homes.
The boy stayed by the river, too numb with grieving to notice the cold, too
blind with tears to know that it was too dark to see. He wept until there was
nothing left of him but whimpers and twitches and a tiny, questioning sound that
continued even after he finally fell asleep in the rough embrace of tree roots.
He wanted to die, and indeed, weak and wet as a newborn in the night breeze, he
might have had his wish before morning. But then the moon rose, and the singing
began.
To this day in that village, old men and women whose greatest grandparents were
warm in their cradles on that night will speak of that singing as though they
themselves had wakened to the song. There was no one in the village who did not
wake, no one who did not come wondering to the doorЧthough few dared step
beyondЧbut it is always said that each heard different music from a different
quarter. The cobblerТs son was the first to wake, by all accounts, dreamily
certain that the hides of two marsh-goats his father had hung and scraped the
day before were singing bitterly beautiful lullabies in the tanning shed. He
shook the old man, who leaped up swearing that he heard the voices of his dead
wife and his brother cursing him by turns like soldiers under his own window. On
a hillside above the town, a shepherd roused, not to the roar of a charging
sheknath, but to mocking airs of rebellion among his flock; the baker woke, not
to a sound at all, but with a sweet aroma, such as his earthen ovens had never