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

If sheтАЩd been as hard-headed and practical as she thought she was, she would
have laid back and let him force himself on her, endured his grunting and thrusting
and battering either in silence or with as much of a simulation of passionate
enjoyment as she could muster, let him contemptuously wipe his dick on her
afterward and then tell him how witty that was. But as he bore her down, smothering
her under his weight and stench, bruising her flesh with his vise-like fingers, all her
buried romanticism came rushing to the surfaceтАФit wasnтАЩt supposed to be like
this!тАФand as she heard her dress and undergarments rip under his tearing hands and
felt the night air on her suddenly exposed breasts, she fought herself free with a
sudden burst of panicked strength, and clawed the PrinceтАЩs face.
They both leaped to their feet. The Prince stared at her in astonishment for a
moment, three deep claw marks on his cheek dripping vivid red blood, and then
came for her again, murder rather than sex on his mind this time.
 Eleanor had been attacked beforeтАФonce by a stablehand and once by a
greengrocer in a lane behind the market at duskтАФand she knew what to do.
She kicked the Prince hard in the crotch, putting her weight and the strength of
her powerful young legs into it, and the Prince mewed and folded and fell, wrapping
himself into a tight ball on the floor, for the instant too shocked by pain even to
scream.
EleanorтАЩs practicality returned with a rush. She was moments away from being
arrested, and probably jailed for the rest of her life, certainly for many years. Maybe
theyтАЩd even execute her. What the Prince had tried to do to her wouldnтАЩt matter, she
knew. No one would care. All that would count was what she had done to him.
She gathered her ruined dress around her, hiding her breasts as well as she
could, and fled the alcove. Straight across the Grand Ballroom and out of the palace,
as fast as she could go without actually running, as voices began to rise in the
distance behind her, and the palace clock chimed midnight.
You know the rest, or you think that you do.
The next day, the Prince did begin searching obsessively for her, but it was
for revenge, not for love; the three red weals across his handsome face filled him
with a rage that momentarily eclipsed even drinking and screwing, his usual
preoccupations, and goaded him to furious action.
Fortunately for Eleanor, she had been wise enough not to use her real name,
or her full name, at least, with those sheтАЩd talked with at the Ball, and as she was not
a regular in court circles, nobody knew where to find her.
That was where the famous slipper came in. Yes, there was a slipper, but it
was an ordinary one, not one made of glass. тАЬGlassтАЭ is a mistranslation of the
French word used by Perrault; what he really said was тАЬfur.тАЭ It wasnтАЩt fur eit her.
For that matter, it wasnтАЩt really a slipper. It was an ordinary dress shoe of the type
appropriate to that time and place.
But it had slipped off EleanorтАЩs foot while she struggled with the Prince in the
alcove, and it was infused with her scent. By mid-afternoon the next day, the secret
police were using teams of keen-nosed hunting dogs, following her scent on the
slipper, to try to track her through the streets to her home.
There was, of course, no nonsense about trying the slipper on the feet of
every woman in the kingdom. Nor did EleanorтАЩs step-sisters cut bits of their own
feet off in order to try to get them to fit into the slipper, as some versions of this
story would have it. Nor did flocks of angry birds fly down and peck out their eyes
and bite off their noses (a scene Disney inexplicably missed somehow), as in other
versions.