"Peter David - Sir Apropos 01 - Sir Apropos Of Nothing" - читать интересную книгу автора (David Peter)

and recommence the narrative at the only truly proper place for it: the beginning. This, I assure you, will
bring us back to the false beginning--which will actually be somewhere around the middle by the time we
rendezvous with it. The ending will arrive in its own time, as it often does. So...let us begin.

I never actually knew my mother's name.

That's not to say she wasn't there. It's just that she never told me. Oh, she told me an assortment of
monikers that she collected in the way that the underside of a bed collects dust. She would choose a
different name from month to month, sometimes from week to week, depending upon her mood. I'm not
entirely certain why she adopted this odd practice. Perhaps she was anxious to distance herself from
whoever or whatever she once was. Perhaps she sought out a fanciful existence and thought that varied
names would bring her a bit closer to that aspiration. Perhaps she was just crazy.

I will, for convenience's sake and the sanity of the reader, refer to her by the name she bore at the
time that she also bore me, and that name was Madelyne.

Madelyne was a rather ordinary-looking woman. Once she was a pretty enough thing, but that had
been many years before I made her acquaintance. She did not speak all that much of her early life. But
based on things that she occasionally let slip, plus rather coarse comments that were made by others, I
suspect that she got herself pregnant at a young age, possibly by some knight errant. Knights fascinated
Madelyne, even at a tender age. She was prone to worshipping them, and indulged in that tendency by
worshipping them while prone. An assignation with a knight was a dream come true for her. For him, I
would assume, it was merely a lark, a tumble in the high grass with a willing young thing from the town.
He went on his way, and about a month later, she went on her knees one morning and vomited rather
convulsively, seized in the unloving arms of morning sickness.

She could have tried to abort the child, but no one valued life more devotedly, or more foolishly, than
Madelyne. I say foolish because people who attribute any sort of miracle to life can only be considered
fools. We humans pat ourselves on the back, strutting and preening when we manage to pop out a single
child, and I've seen dragons lay nests of a half dozen eggs or more. Even the most common creature can
generate the biological process that is reproduction. Life, miraculous? Nonsense. Putting infants on this
planet, there's nothing miraculous about that. What's miraculous is when we let them live to grow out of
infancy.

Upon informing her loving and understanding parents of her pregnancy, she was summarily shown the
door by her father and informed that her presence would no longer be required, because they resided in
a decent house, by God. A house of respect, a house of peace, where such things simply didn't happen.

In case you're thinking that my mother was sent out into the snow with poor, helpless little Apropos
couched within her womb, you can set that aside right now. Would that my own conception had been
that...tidy.

With nowhere to go and none to take care of her, Madelyne resolved to care for herself. But a mere
two weeks later, as she lay within the makeshift shelter she had created deep in the Elderwoods,
Madelyne curled up in pain, her guts twisting and on fire. Thunder cracked overhead, adding a sense of
morbid drama to the entire business. Melodrama aside, the outcome was that there was a puddle of
bloody mess pooled around her by the following morning. Poor Madelyne. If she had only managed to
keep her mouth shut, nature would have disposed of her indiscretion in its own good time.

But despite the loss of her child, she was still out of luck. Her father had made abundantly clear to her