"Gardner Dozois - Fairy Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

she had come to hate, working like a slave day and night for people she didnтАЩt even
like, much less consider to be family, until her youth and strength and beauty drained
away like water spilled in the street, and she woke up one day to find herself
spavined and old.
She could feel this doom closing in around her like a black cloud, making
every day a little more hopeless and bitter and grim. She could feel herself dying, a
little bit every day, her mind dulling, her strength and resiliency waning.
Somehow, she had to get out of here.
But there was no way outтАж
After several months of this bleak circle, she decided at last that there was
only one possible way to escape: she would trade sex for a better lifeтАФor at least a
more comfortable one.
It was a choice that untold thousands of young womenтАФand not a few
menтАФhad made before her, and that thousands more would make after her. SheтАЩd
looked her situation over with cold-eyed clarity, and realized that she had no
commodity to offer that anyone would ever value except for youth, beauty, and
virginityтАФand that none of them were going to last long. A few more years of
constant grinding toil would take care of the youth and beauty, and sooner or later
one of the men who had been circling her with increasing persistence would corner
her in the stables or behind a market stall or in an alley somewhere and rape her, and
that would be the end of her virginity (a valuable commodity ever since syphilis had
started to ravage Europe a few centuries back) as well. If he got her pregnant, sheтАЩd
be stuck here forever.
Young as she was, she was not unaware of the trick that her body could be
made to do when she huddled alone in the darkness on her cot at night, biting a
dish-cloth to keep anyone from hearing the sounds that she couldnтАЩt stop herself
from making, and she was not so hard-headed as to be immune to thoughts of love
and romance and marriage. In fact, sheтАЩd exchanged hot glances, longing words,
and one quick delicious kiss with Casimir, a big, lumbering, sweet-natured boy who
worked in the glass foundry a street away. She was pretty sure that she could win his
heart, perhaps even get him to marry herтАФbut what good would that do? Even if
they could somehow scrape up enough money to live on, sheтАЩd still be stuck in this
stifling provincial town, living much the same kind of life she was living now. And
then the children would start coming, one a year until she wore out and diedтАж
No, love and marriage were not going to save her. Sex was going to have to
do that. SheтАЩd have to trade her body to someone rich enough to take her out of this
life, perhaps even, if things worked out for the best, out of this town altogether.
EleanorтАЩs religious upbringing had not perhaps been of the strictest, her father
tending towards clandestine secularism, but of course some qualms about the idea
of selling herself in this fashion remained. Still, she had heard the women talking at
the well or in the marketplace or even in the church when no man was around to
hear, and it didnтАЩt sound all that difficult. Lay on your back, open your legs, let him
grunt on top of you for five minutes while you stared at the ceiling. A lot less
difficult than scrubbing the floor until your fingers bleed.
But if she was going to sell herself, she was damned if she wasnтАЩt going to get
the best price possible.
Eleanor prided herself on her clear-eyed logic and hard-headed rationality, but
hereтАЩs where her plan began to be tinged by a deep vein of pastel romanticism that
she wouldnтАЩt even have admitted to herself that she possessed.
She had no intention of becoming a common whore, if whore she must be.