"CHARLES COLEMAN FINLEY - A democracy of trolls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finley Charles Coleman)

The rain-heavy breeze carried good scents. Windy smelled the fruit ripening on the pear trees away down the valley. Off in the direction of the sunset, toward the river, she thought she sniffed something dead, maybe drowned in yesterday's flood. Small, but still a good meal if she'd been hungry enough to go looking for it. She turned her head the other direction toward the little hollow of land where the cave was. She smelled Mosswater strongly above all else, and the faint scent of the lion, and goat's blood a couple days old. The squash were ripening, and the corn, and the beans inside that little thorn wall. And then she smelled something else ....
Ragweed caught the same scent. "Hot diggety!" he shouted, making an enthusiastic scooping motion with his hands before he ran down the hill. "Fresh rotten meat!"
"Be careful!" she cried out. But Snapper was dead, the one that came out and shouted at Mosswater and threw fire at him. At least she thought he was. Holding her baby tight to her chest, she ran after Ragweed.
Ragweed stopped beside his dead brother, whose body sprawled face down in the mud. Windy paused beside him and only then did her ears, which were better than the average troll's, certainly much better than Ragweed's, detect the high- pitched crying. When Ragweed turned to enter the cave she tripped him, grabbing hold of his wrist so he couldn't break his fall. As he squawked, hitting the ground, she rushed past him and inside.
The odors hit her first. The dead man -- Snapper -- and the dead woman. There was something wrong with the woman's flesh. The smell of baby poop and urine were also strong. Windy wrinkled her nose, swiveled her head around until she saw the woman's corpse in the corner with the baby sitting there chewing on her hair. Its eyes were shut, so tired it could barely sit up straight as it cried.
Ragweed burst through the doorway behind her. "Ho there! Save some for me!"
He shoved her down and she kicked at him. He dodged her foot, hopping ponderously over her outstretched leg. She dropped her dead daughter, dove under Ragweed's groping arms, and slid across the dirt floor on her tender breasts to grab the crying baby first. She curled around it protectively.
"Go ahead," Ragweed said, clearly disappointed. "It's not much. Won't fill your belly up."
The baby continued to wail as it snuggled into Windy's arms. It rubbed its face around her breast until its tiny mouth closed on the hard pebble of her nipple. It didn't have much of a suck compared to her little girl, but then it didn't need much of one either.
Ragweed picked up the woman's hand, stuck the fingers in his mouth, and chewed on them. After a couple crunches, he spit them out and dropped her arm. "This one's still warm, but she's been sick. Ought to let her rot for a couple days. She'll taste better with bugs in her."
Windy wrinkled her flat nose again. The dead woman was this baby's mother; she suddenly felt quite protective of her. "Go chew on Snapper then," she said. "He's been dead longer."
"All gristle, no fat, like enough," muttered Ragweed, but he crossed the room.
Windy caressed the baby's head. It had such beautiful black hair, disguising its misshapen skull and lack of a brow. Large -- gorgeously large -- eyes in the painfully flat face stared right at her before they fluttered shut. The ache in Windy's heart eased as quickly as the soreness in her breast.
"Ack!"
Ragweed jumped back so hard he fell on his bottom. He bounced up and retreated across the room to Windy's side.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Go look for yourself! I'm not getting near it, not if it was a rotten mammut on a hot summer night and I hadn't eaten anything in ten days."
Windy carefully cradled the suckling baby to her, took a step forward, and then almost turned to stone. She didn't need to get any closer to see the amber-colored ampules strung around the dead man's neck. They were magic, sunlight trapped in warm ice. If either one cracked accidentally it could kill them both. She hopped backward so fast the baby lost the nipple. Its eyes flew wide open.
"You'll have to share it now," Ragweed said.
Windy kept one eye on Snapper's body as if he might leap up and attack her. The baby stretched its neck, trying to get its mouth back on her breast. "Share what?"
"The live meat."
"No!" She dodged his sudden grasp, bolted out the door and into the yard. He chased after her.
"We always share meat," he said.
"This isn't meat -- it's a baby!"
He slouched back on his haunches and laughed. "Don't be crazy! You're just sad because you lost your girl. You don't mean to keep that thing."
She hadn't realized that was exactly what she meant to do until she heard him say it. "I can. And I will."
He thumped his knuckles on his chest to frighten her. She wasn't impressed and frowned at him until he gave it up. "If that's how you feel," he said, pacing in a circle around her, "then we'll just have to take a vote. All those in favor of eating the live meat, raise your hand."
He threw his hand up into the air, looking around the way he always did at meetings to see who was voting with him. She ignored him, and, gently as she could, switched the baby around, so it could drink from the other sore and swollen breast.
"All right then, everybody in favor of keeping the meat for a baby, raise your hand."
Windy lifted hers as she looked down, making a kissy mouth at the child. It stopped sucking long enough to laugh and reached up to touch her face.
"That's two against one," she said. "We win."
"It can't vote!"
"Well, it raised its hand." She really just hoped to confuse and distract Ragweed, because even if Mosswater was still alive and they both outvoted her, she wasn't about to give up this new baby. She reached down to tickle its belly and saw it was a boy. "He heard you, and he raised his hand. So there."
"But --!" Ragweed sputtered off, then slammed his hands down, splattering mud everywhere.
The baby jerked at the sound, but she made another kissy mouth and a smoochy sound and he giggled again. His eyelids seemed very heavy as he swallowed gulp after gulp.
"You aren't going to keep that thing, are you? It's an animal."
"Is not." He had eyes just like her darling girl, she decided. Whatever he was -- whatever people were -- they were more than animals, even if they weren't trolls.
Ragweed circled her. "It's a maggot, that's what it is."
"He's a big strong baby." To be truthful, he wasn't big or strong. But he was a baby and now he was her baby.
"It's a maggot. It's little, white, and it wouldn't make a mouthful, and you found it crawling on a dead body. Maggot, maggot, maggot!"
"He is not a maggot!" She threw a clump of mud at Ragweed but it missed and smacked wetly against the side of the turtle shell.
"Well, it ain't a slug." Ragweed hurled a mudball back at her, with better aim. She ducked, blocking it with her free arm, as he wandered over to the garden and shoved a half-ripe gourd into his mouth. He turned over some leaves near the bottoms of the plants. "Slugs have stripes," he said sullenly around a mouthful of pulp and seeds. "Least some do. The tasty ones."
He grazed through the garden without offering anything to her. Windy rocked her massive forearm until the baby fell sleep. After a while she rose and ate a little also. Her hunger had returned. "What are you going to do about Mosswater?" she asked.
Ragweed looked up at the sky. It was getting late. He shrugged. "Thought I'd drag him back up to our cave, shove him in the back."
"Maybe tomorrow night?" Windy hated this time of year, when the nights were too short and too warm without enough time to do anything but eat.
Ragweed knuckle-walked over to his brother's corpse. "I don't want to come back here tomorrow."
"Maybe we could put him in the turtle shell with Snapper."
"Huh." Ragweed poked the dead body. "We could do that."
Windy felt so relieved she paused to empty her bladder. She didn't want to come back here tomorrow night either. She helped Ragweed drag and push Mosswater's body through the narrow doorway. While Ragweed laid his brother in the corner farthest from the door and window, she picked up her daughter and placed her beside the dead woman. She tucked the hand with the missing fingers under the little girl, and draped the other arm across her body. She carefully avoided Snapper's body.
Ragweed waited in the doorway. "You done?"