"Buck,DorisP.-Giberel, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Buck Doris Pitkin)

"I can look at the stars."

For a moment they were silent. Then: "She mocks us."

"No. She gives a message. Aramere, whisper it to me."

"When I watch stars, I draw their light into my reflecting eyes. Afterward, if I look at a plant it will grow. Grow taller than in the . light of the one star that shines from daybreak till evening." They all heard.

"She mocks. Heap earth over her slowly."

"Slowly."

As in an antiphonal chant: "Slowly."
Aramere gulped, choked, "I have not done it yet. But I can." Frigid laughter answered. Hands as cold started to push her toward the shallow pit.

She screamed, "I can. I can."

With all her strength she reached toward a bushy plant in the nearest row. She could almost touch it. She looked beyond it, and up. Stars were all the colors she had ever seen. Her eyes drank them as mouths drink water.

She was jostled this way and that, pulled from the plant in the row.

And suddenly the plant reached for her, long boughs creeping toward the brightness of her eyes like moths seeking flame.

"Fools!" Aramere's mother chided. "Every moonless night do we not stand in fields the toadfolk mess with by day? Do we not reach toward the night-heaven with our bodies, with our heron necks? And the shining particles in our giberel eyes catch and mirror the far turbulence of stars that in the old times, the wise times before the Bomb, were known to increase growth. We move blindly now, yet we understand that. Without the night-stars and the day-star there would be little new, by sowing, by harvest."

A second plant stretched toward Aramere.

In sudden revulsion the giberels cried, "We have been given our miracle. See one plant here. Another. And another. Forget her toadfolk hands with supple fingers. Forget. Remember only her potent eyes. Honor to Aramere!" They danced away under Aramere's stars into the night.

Aramere rested exhausted against her mother. She failed- to understand murmured heresies. "Who knows what the stars hold in store for us? Change. Change. Mayhap they try to give back what the Bomb destroyed." Then the woman forgot stars and their mysteries as she kissed Aramere from silken hair to knees, from spur like thumb to the quick-moving fingers no giberel had ever known.

Aramere's eyes focused starlight canto the crops that in endless rhythm toadfolk tended with their hands by day and giberels with their eyes by night. Each year as the harvest was gathered under sun or counted in moonlight, the yield was greater, though some said the earth never forgot, never forgave its old scars. Others whispered that if perhaps a savior arose-There for lack of imagination the whispers died.

To Aramere that was a vast indifference. She did her work. She was revered, almost a goddess to the peoples whose hunger she lessened. Even toadfolk made her a home with lintels carved and painted to resemble fruits and edible pods. They and the giberels roofed it with overlapping thatch, thickness on thickness. At the doorway her own spring gushed, surrrounded with a stone rim, green like early spring because she was a virgin.

She was accustomed to receive offerings and, artifacts. But those who brought them stayed only to genuflect and lay out their gifts in patterns. They never waited like the giberel who stood before her now. I He lingered to sing cadences repeating the sounds of her name. Recklessly he gathered peach branches that would fruit. He set these in bowls beside her door. Later he floated apple blossoms, each resting singly on clear water. She had been taught letters by her parent and spelled out Ara mere between little gasps at anyone so rash as to pluck his apple blooms to make them say her name in color and perfume.

"How many nights of stars," at last he asked her, "until we lie in each other's arms? How many, Aramere? The sacred circle, the great woman symbol," he bowed at the word as all giberel lovers did, "should be formed to dance our marriage."

"I shall never marry," she told him at dawn, when giberels fell the coming of sleep. "Never marry," she said clearly at twilight, looking into the dusk.

At first he thought this the shyness of a maiden. At last the man required of her, but gently, "Give your reason for nay-saying."

She shook her head. "Dear love, leave me."

"When you call me your love?",
"Leave me."

"Never."