"Esther M. Friesner - Hallowmass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

ESTHER M. FRIESNER

HALLOWMASS

Esther Friesner reports that her recent efforts include a collaborative novel
with Mercedes Lackey, as yet untitled, and that her fourth "Chick" anthology,
The Chick Is in the Mail, will be out in January.

This new fantasy story was inspired by a trip to Chartres cathedral At one
point, Esther heard "beautiful, silvery threads of music that seemed to spiral
down from no visible source in the shadows above." Further examination, however,
revealed a young man playing a flute ,in front of the cathedral and some trick
of acoustics obviously drew the melody into the building.

Read on and see how our Connecticut bard transmuted this small scene into a
lovely yarn.

MASTER, THE HEART OF THESE things came to pass in the autumn of the year that
the great cathedral neared completion. Beyond the town walls the fields were
nearly bare and the forest put on splendor. Bright leaf crowns of bronze and
purple, scarlet and gold flung themselves over the secret fastnesses of the wood
where terrors crouched. In the shorn fields asters winked blue among the
stubble. And everywhere, in the streets and on the narrow track slipping between
the hills to the outlying villages, there was song.

The countryfolk sang because their harvest was done and the war had slithered
its huge, armored body far into the south that year. Mothers sang cradle songs
to cradles where for once no spectral hand of famine or illness or whetted steel
had crept to touch and take their babes. Farmers bellowed drinking songs in the
taverns because singing drowned out the noise of backbones that creaked and
snapped when honest working men at last unbent their spines from the labor of
reaping and stacking, threshing and winnowing the grain.

Giles was a man who made his songs with stone. He was well past the middle years
of Adam's sons, his raven hair streaked and stippled with gray, his beard blazed
silver like the back of a badger. When he first arrived, over fifteen Easters
agone, no one in the town knew where he came from or who paid out his wages. He
presented himself to the widow Agnes who had a small house hard by the
cathedral's growing shadow and offered her a fair price for the rental of a
room, food to fill his belly, and the free use of her modest yard. The yard
stood behind the house and was supposed to contain the widow's humble garden,
but the plastered walls of the house itself hoarded sunlight from what few
plants struggled their way out of the sour soil, and in time the cathedral's
rising walls shouldered aside almost everything but shadows.

The widow Agnes therefore did not complain too loudly when the nature of Giles's
intent for her property was made known. The very next day after his arrival, a
dust-faced man named Paul the Brown presented himself at her door driving a cart
with a load of fresh timber. She recognized him as one of the bishop's
lowest-ranked servants and kept her thoughts to herself when Giles rushed out to