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

"Yes," the boy agreed. "I have her face here, in my hands. She let me touch her
face and left me after. I came back to that same place in the forest many times,
but I never met with her again. All I have left is what she gave me." And now he
loosed the longing of his tears.

Later that day Margaret could do nothing but mutter "Lackwit, madman, fool,"
when Master Giles announced he'd taken the blind boy to be his apprentice.
Others said the same when the news went 'round.

"How can you do this thing?" Master Martin demanded as the two stonecutters sat
in the tavern over wine. Outside the wind howled early March's chill damnation
and blew away lost souls' last grasp on their graves. "He can't see the stone.
How will he shape it?"

"You mind your Apostles and leave me to mind my saints," was all Master Giles
replied.

All that he knew was the need to shelter his son from a world that would destroy
him if it heard his tale of the lady in the wood. The only way he could see to
prevent this was to take the boy into his care, and the one path open to him
there was to name him apprentice.

In time, it might have been forgotten, but for Margaret.

The bishop did not care if Master Giles apprenticed himself a wild dog so long
as his chisel continued to shape saints for the glorification of the cathedral.
He praised the sweetness of Master Giles's Saint Agnes and could not commend the
sculptor's skill highly enough when his next creation, the beautiful Saint
Sebastian, drew the hearts as well as the eyes of all who saw it. (And if the
saint's face was the image of the man's apprentice lad, what of that? Time
enough to inquire into such matters after all twelve niches of the south porch
held their treasures.)

It was Margaret kept things on the boil, Margaret whose tongue wagged free in
the marketplace, the tavern, the church, the street. When Master Giles took
Benedict for his apprentice, he stole away not only that woman's unpaid servant
but the butt at which she shot her wormwood-tipped barbs. How could the loveless
woman feel superior to the beloved dead if she could no longer hurl abuse at
love's living proof? Her tongue had lost its whetstone and its target. All that
remained to her was to hound Master Giles with a madman's reputation as
punishment for his having taken away her sport.

"Let him be as mad as Nebuchadnezzar," said the bishop. "But let him give me
saints." So Master Giles gave him next Saint Catherine of Alexandria. "That
face!" the bishop cried when the sculptor and his workmen brought the finished
statue to the cathedral grounds. "Twisted as an old grapevine's root. The holy
legends rated her a beauty, but this is a shrew."

"Ah well...." Master Giles shrugged. "So many centuries, looking after the