"Cecilia Dart-Thornton - The Bitterbynde 01 - The Ill-Made Mute" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dart-Thornton Cecilia)

Its jaw hung slack, a crater of hollow disbeliefтАФit had simply forgotten, or had never known, how
to make speech. Frantically it searched its memories. It was then that the fist of despair slammed into the
foundling.
There were no memories.
 None at all.
The thing, pale and debilitated, stared into hot iron darkness for half the night. To its dismay, it could
dredge up no recollection of a past and was unable to evoke its own name, if name it had ever
possessed.
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As days passed in bewilderment, meaningless sounds began to metamorphose into
half-comprehended wordsтАФcommunications among other people. Although still confused, the newcomer
compared their raiment with that which Grethet had put on him and concluded that its own sex was male.
This was an identity, no matter how generalized, to be grasped and held secure, a solid fact in a morass
of uncertainty.
He also discovered that he was unwelcome.
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Despite his inability to guess or understand more than half of what they were saying, it was not
difficult for the misshapen youth to recognize the despisal, contempt, and hatred of the people among
whom he dwelled. He huddled into a smaller bony heap in the furnace-room corner when children spat at
him. They thought him too repulsive to be approached, or they would have pinched him, as indeed they
slyly pinched one another. Men and women generally ignored him. When they noticed him, they ranted
coldly at Grethet, who appeared unconcerned. Sometimes, as if in self-defense, she would point out the
stranger's hair for their inspection. The apparent importance of his hair, he could not fathom. It seemed
that she was tough, this old woman; they could not sway her. However, her frail patient had no illusions
that she nurtured any love for himтАФshe was kind, in a callous way, and he owed her his life, but all her
actions were in the long term self-serving. To act selfishly, as the youth learned, was the way to survive in
this place.
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What was this place? The youth knew little of it beyond the windowless furnace room with its huge
wood-stack, where translucent spiders concealed themselves with only their claw-tips showing in rows of
four. The black walls of this chamber were rough-hewn blocks of rock; they sparkled with tiny silver
points where they caught the firelight. One corner of the room held the hefty iron fire-tongs, pokers, and
other implements with which Grethet poked the fire after the men stoked it, several times a day.
Men here wore the drab surcoat belted at the waist, the thick breeches stuffed into boots, and the
oddly heavy hood that was left to hang down behind the shoulders. Their wood-brown hair was cut
short. Some were bearded. They disregarded the stranger as they ignored the other crawling things
scrambling out of the fuel or unwisely hiding in it, to be later incinerated, curling in silent agony like dried
leaves in the flames.
The children would poke at the wood-heap, disturbing insects and arachnids that scuttled crazily
across the floor. Curiously emotionless, the brats stamped in a frenzied danceтАФwhen they had finished, a
random design of smashed cephalothoraxes and carapaces remained, like pressed orchids, scarcely
visible on the black stone floor with its shining flecks.
Truly, the lesser creatures had little chance.
Most of the time, Grethet was elsewhere. She would appear briefly to tend the fire, sometimes
bringing food, abruptly leaning close to her ward to whisper, so that he shrank from her stinking breath.
"Boy," she would always say, "You, boy. You do as I say. It is better."
The youth in his weakness was grateful to be left alone, to lie in the warmth, feeling the pounding of
the ravening heart in his birdcage chest; drifting in and out of exhausted, dreamless sleep.
He had been discovered, like a babe, with eyes shuttered against the world; this finding was the
foundation of his aliveness. But unlike a babe, he was gifted with more than raw, untutored instinctтАФhis