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

She nodded and walked outside with him. He stood upright on his hind legs and craned his neck around, looking for stones. "Let's seal up the whole cave," she said.
"With what?"
She waved her hand at the mounds of wood and thorn that surrounded the little cottage. He grunted and set to work. Windy moved the smaller pieces for fear of disturbing the baby, slight though he felt in her arms. They filled in the little hole and the big hole, and heaped mounds around the walls. Windy scooped up clumps of mud with her free hand and packed it in tight around the holes. When they finished, Ragweed walked around it, lifting his leg and spraying. The scent would scare off scavengers and protect their dead.
"Now we have to hurry if we aren't going to get caught out in the Sun," he said.
She looked up. He was right. They raced across the high ridge and she could smell dawn in the air. They halted briefly in the meadow to drink from the swollen pond and she noticed the lion's scent. It too had been here to drink in the night. She decided to blame it for her daughter's death. Then she looked at the child she held.
It's going to be all right, she told herself. Ragweed will let me keep the baby. They would return to the mountains among the hot springs and the good smell of sulfur, away from all the people. Things would be just like they were before.
"We should leave this valley," she said. She thought about her own mother. "We should go home."
"Not until the pears get ripe," said Ragweed, pushing aside the brush in his hurry to hide. He squeezed his huge bulk through the narrow crack, then rolled over on his back and rubbed his big round belly. "The trees full of pears and nobody to eat them but us. I don't want to miss that! They won't be eating any pears back home."
"That's a long time from now," she said, squeezing in after him. "What are we going to eat until then?"
He bared his teeth in a half-grin. "I don't know about you, but I'm hungry for a little maggot."
She turned her back to him and wrapped her arms around the sleeping child.
"YOU AREN'T going to keep it, are you?"
"Him, not it, mother," Windy answered through a mouth full of blueberries. Her large fingers circled the branches, scooping off another bunch of ripe fruit while her mother did the same beside her. The older troll's downy white hair contrasted sharply with her gray skin in the moonlight. "And yes," Windy said, "I am going to keep him."
"We'd heard tales, from Crash, when he went down into the people valleys last year, but I didn't believe him. And then you finally return with it." She frowned.
Windy looked across the bog. Her little boy played in the scrub grass with two little girls his own age but twice his size. Sometimes she scarcely believed it herself.
"Four winters, five summers," her mother said, reproach in her voice. "It's a long time to be away, even if you were ashamed."
"I'm not ashamed." She shoved the blueberries in her mouth and chewed. "We were going to come back that first winter, but the baby --"
"Maggot," her mother interrupted.
She swallowed. "That's what Ragweed calls him."
"I know. He's been telling everyone, but we'd already heard it from Crash. So what do you call it?"
Windy had called the baby by her daughter's name for nearly a year but the boy never answered to it, maybe because she only whispered it to him in his sleep. And then Ragweed called him Maggot so often that it was the only name her boy responded to. She sighed. "Maggot."
Her mother made a rumbling hum in her throat. She plucked the berries off the branches one by one, filling her cupped hand. "Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three for a handful. I can still count higher than anyone else. And faster too. Heh! So that first winter?"
"Terrible." Windy wanted to explain how she tried to leave Ragweed but couldn't, how there was never a good time to sneak away, not so he wouldn't notice. "It was terrible."
"Why?"
"Before winter even, the baby grew so cold. His skin turned all blue at night." She shivered. That winter bloomed into another summer before she found the courage to take her frail child among the icy peaks, and while they hunted food night to night and fattened up again, that summer rotted into winter, and before she knew it four years had passed by as swift as midsummer nights. "So we stayed down in the warmer valleys."
"You should have let it die."
"Him, mother."
"No. It."
Other trolls hulked through the blueberry patches, eating steadily without talking, filling their bellies while the darkness lasted. The children strayed farther away in their play. Maggot was a delicate child, his skin so thin she could practically see through it. The risks he took could stop her heart. She followed after them, conveniently escaping the prick of her mother's comments.
A rock outcropping capped the slope. Windy waded free of the blueberry patch and went to sit by the stones. "Talking with the stupid dead" they called it, because the stories said that these rocks were trolls that let themselves get caught out in the Sun. The best thing about the stupid dead, Windy thought, was that their mistake was always worse than yours.
"Hi, stupid," Windy said, patting the rock as she sat.
Distant mountains formed walls on either side of the high plain and the dark sky, close enough to touch, gave it a comforting cavelike roof. Bringing her son up here for the first time brought back all the memories of her own happy childhood: the bleak beauty of long winter nights -- her favorite season before she became a mother -- when clusters of the bitter berries on mountain ash gleamed bright against the white skin of windswept snow; the scents of rhododendrons blooming under slivered spring moons, laurel at midsummer; huckleberries, blueberries, teaberries, and cranberries, each in its season, as many as she could ever eat; fogs so dense she could open her mouth and drink water straight out of the air, with unexpected frosts even in the summer that cooled her toes while she foraged. She hadn't realized how much she missed the smell of bobcat spray until she came up here and caught a whiff of it again tonight.
Maggot played with the girls on the slope below the blueberry bushes along the edge of the bogs where cranberries grew and the grasses turned all shadow-tipped in autumn. Windy looked beyond him. A herd of giant elk grazed about a mile away, their wide flat antlers rising and falling in silhouette against the sky. She counted seventeen elk before their heads jerked up in unison and they darted away. Leaning forward, she saw a dyrewolf bolt out of the grasses where the elk had been.
Dyrewolves hunted in packs. Where there was one, there were more. "Maggot," Windy said. She didn't speak loudly. Her son's ears were as powerful as a troll's eyes.
He stopped playing and waved to her. The two girls looked up the hill, confused by his actions.
"Stay close by," she said, for his ears only. "There are dyrewolves hunting."
He smacked his lips with a nod of his head, as if he already knew. Then he put his hands to his mouth. "Awroooooooo!"
It sounded enough like a dyrewolf's cry to send a chill up her spine. He could mimic almost anything. She saw his head turn first, and then the girls'. When she followed their eyes and concentrated, she heard, faintly, the dyrewolf howling in return. "Stay close!" she shouted at the top of her voice.
He waved to her again and she felt better. After that the girls pretended they were scared, running away as he howled like a dyrewolf and chased them. The sight of him and the sharp faint shriek of their laughter made Windy smile. But she remained wary. A pack of dyrewolves could bring down a solitary full-grown troll. Her son was so much smaller and weaker than the other trolls.
On the steep edge of the slope a stunted grove of red cedars leaned away from the constant wind. When the girls ran in that direction, followed by Maggot, his shoulder-length hair whipped by the hard breeze, Windy was relieved. She could sniff the air and not smell wolves or other dangers in it.
Windy sniffed again, taking in the scent of the trees. Down in the valleys the red cedars reached great heights, but here the tallest barely overtopped a full-grown troll, although, thinking about it, that still made them the tallest plant around. But they were twisted and deformed by the unrelenting pressure of the constant wind, the west face naked and all their tattered branches stretching east. On bad nights, the gusts could tumble trolls and send them rolling across the bog.
Windy watched her son, his pale skin luminous in the partial moonlight. Her son was also a creature from the valleys. She wondered what it would do to him to grow up here in troll country, whether he'd end up deformed in some way like the cedars.
Her mother climbed the rocks, sat down beside her, and pointed to the trees. "Do you know what those look like?"
A trollbird settled on Windy's back and began picking nits off her skin. She stayed still not to disturb it. "They smell like the big cedars that grow farther down the slopes. I was just thinking about that."
"No, that's not it." Her mother stretched out a long arm, grabbed the branch of a blueberry bush, and collected more of the juicy blue-black fruit. "They look like the killing leaves."
Windy didn't know what her mother meant. "Killing leaves?"
"Once, there were many more trolls than there are now. Some of us lived in the southern mountains then. When I was a young girl, I did." Windy had heard all this before, and didn't care much for her mother's childhood stories. "There were people, blackhairs, also living in the southern mountains then. Too many to count or chase away, but they left us alone and we avoided them. Then other people moved in, just like those who moved into the lower valleys here. The two groups gathered together, against each other, in these big packs. Like dyrewolves on the one side and the little bigtooth lions on the other."
Windy had never heard this story before. The trollbird skittered between her shoulder blades. Her skin twitched.
"The two packs, they had these killing leaves," her mother made a three-sided shape with her fingers, "big ones, one leaf on each tree. They carried them. So we crept down out of the mountains to see them. One morning, before the Sun came up, there were all these horns blowing. We hid in our caves all that day but we couldn't sleep because we knew something was wrong. When we came back to the field that night, it was littered with carrion. More dead men than there are berries on these bushes, the smell so thick it made your stomach swell, like to bursting. And the killing leaves in tatters, shredded, lying this way and that, pieces shaking in the wind." She pointed to the cedars. "They looked just like those trees."
Windy wished she'd never heard this story. "So?"