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

Margaret gave a harsh sniff. "This is Benedict," she said, and she siezed the
boy roughly by the wrist and thrust the lead-rope of her donkey into his hand.
She barged into the widow Agnes's house without another word, leaving Master
Giles to stare at the boy as blankly as if he himself were the sightless one.

The boy leaned on his staff and got to his feet, holding fast to the donkey's
rope. "Is there a stable?" he asked, stooping to juggle rope and staff so that
he might hold these and still take up his bundle.

"I will take care of the beast," Master Giles said, his tongue stumbling over
the words as a score of unasked questions struggled for precedence. He tried to
disengage the boy's hand from the donkey's lead, but Benedict refused to
relinquish it.

"This is my work," he said. "I am always the one with the beasts."

Master Giles considered the boy's reply as no stranger than his bearing. He did
not seem a servant, yet Margaret did not treat him as kin. "This way, then," he
said at last, and set his hand on the boy's shoulder to guide him to the shack
that served dead Agnes's house for a stable.

The house that once had warmed itself with love now steeped itself in ice. The
house that once had rung with the sweet tempo of iron on stone, keeping time to
a well-loved woman's morning song, now sheltered only silence. Margaret provided
Master Giles with food and shelter and free use of the yard in accordance, to
the letter, with dead Agnes's first agreement with the man. No less. Certainly
no more. The stonecutter could find no matter for complaint in the quality and
quantity of his victuals, and yet he rose from the table empty, burning with a
hunger of the heart, a thirst of the soul.

As promised, the boy Benedict was the one with the beasts. He took care of the
donkey and later, when Margaret purchased a family of chickens and a brown
milk-goat, he looked after these too. He was up early each day, leading his
charges off to graze on what few mouthfuls of dry grass the town green afforded
in the harsh weather. Master Giles heard his staff tap across the paving stones,
falling into its own cadence somewhere between the quicktime of the goat's
hooves and the steady clop of the donkey's feet.

Winter closed over the town. It was a cruel season. Work on the cathedral
slowed, with labor limited to only those artisans whose hands touched the
interior of the sanctuary. Unfinished walls put on a penitent's shirt of thatch
to keep the bitter weather from setting its teeth into the stone. Master Giles
set up canvas walls around his shed and worked on in all weathers, so long as
the frost did not grow deep enough to affect the fiber of the rock.

One morning soon after Candlemas, before even the whisper of dawn had touched
the sky, he was roused from his lonely sleep by the voice of the stone. The hour
was too early even for country-bred Margaret to be padding about. Master Giles
tossed aside his blankets, did up his hose, and pulled on a woolen smock over