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

greet him eagerly. Together the two men transported the lumber into the widow's
yard and from it built a spacious, slant-roofed shed on ground where flowers
often had been planted but never had lived to bloom.

In the days that followed, the widow Agnes witnessed more strange shipments
arrive on her doorstep for her new boarder. There was a small, sturdy table, a
stool standing on four fat legs, a coarse hempen sack that clanked demons out of
the widow's white cat Belle, and lengths of sailcloth, thick with pale dust and
neatly folded. All of these effects were trundled out to the shed in the yard
where some were put in place and others put into ironbound chests of wood that
locked with a snick-clack sound like jackdaws laughing. Last of all came the
stones.

A squadron of servants showed their yellowed teeth to the widow when she
answered their thunderous summons on the day the first more-than-man-size block
of stone arrived. As with the first servant, Paul the Brown, their faces were
all familiar to her--work-creased vizards of skin glimpsed in passing on market
day, or when the widow's curious eye wandered during mass, or in the shadow of
the tavern sign.

The leader of that burly crew doffed a cap frosty with dust and asked, "Where'll
Master Giles have it?" He gestured to the block of raw-hewn stone on the cart
behind him.

"Master Giles?" the widow echoed. Her commerce with the man until this had been
scant and small (and she a woman whose inquisitive tongue could winkle out a
fellow's life history in the time it takes to break a tinker's promise!). She
knew him by that name but not that title.

"Aye, this is the first of 'em," the servant said. He might have said more, but
Master Giles was there, white Belle a mewing ghost at his ankles. He spoke with
brief courtesy to his landlady, begging her pardon for not having forewarned her
of this visitation while at the same time telling her no more about it. Then he
hustled forward to direct the men to move the block of stone into the widow's
yard, under the shelter of the shed.

Some days later the widow Agnes found the form of a man emerging from the great
stone. Crude as God's first tentative pinchings in the red clay that would be
Adam, Master Giles's man lacked the features of a face (unless the first hint of
a high-bridged nose could be reckoned to that credit) and could be said to
possess human hands only as a courtesy to the lumpy mass of rock at the ends of
what might have been arms.

Master Giles saw the widow staring at his work and grinned. His thick hair and
beard were now all white with the breath of chiseled rock, as if the stone were
sucking away his alloted lifespan, but he worked bare-armed and bare-chested in
the pleasant summer weather and the knotted muscles moving sleekly beneath the
skin cried liar! to any who dared to call him old.

"Good day to you, goodwife," he said, still swinging the hammer, still holding