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

her tawny sides. A few curling strands of blue-black hair lay across her face, and one
incongruously long lock of gray the same color as her folded wings. She stirred in her sleep
and rolled partway onto her back, covering her face with her paws, the tufted tip of her
tail twitching in a dream-hunt. Sunlight and shadow described the too-perfect roundness,
the too-icy whiteness of her breasts.
Without realizing it, Vergilius was in human form again. Casting aside the sheet, he
crept toward her on hands and feet that metamorphosed into lion's paws to match her
own. Try as he would, he had yet to find the way to limit his own ' shape-shifting abilities
to something midway between beast and human.
It was as a lion that he stood over her, lowering his blunt, square-muzzled face to one
delicately made ear. Her smell was keener and more pungent in his nostrils when he wore
this shape, all the more compelling and urgent. Lacking the means to use human speech
as he was, he snorted sharp and hot in her ear to rouse her.
Very lazily, the sphynx opened her amber eyes. The pupils were slitted like a cat's, but
the thick lashes above and below were quite human. She smiled, and though her lips were
more sweetly curved than those of any woman he had ever known, the tearing teeth
between rivaled the lion's fangs for cold, keen power.
Her thoughts drifted into his brain slowly, like the languid heavenward trail of incense
burnt to the gods. Again? The thought of a sigh. Very well.
She rose abruptly, whipping out her gray goshawk's wings, knocking the lion into the
water. The wizard heard her harsh, coughing laughter as he hauled himself out of the
muck by claws and paws; it had been no accident. His mane was matted with mud, his
glorious golden coat streaked with brown and green. The sphynx beat her wings once,
twice, not enough to lift her that far from the ground if she had been anything natural. But
her whole being defied nature and all its rules, and so she hovered there, riding a wind
that did not rustle the delicate reeds, and taunted him.
Shall I fly away, Magician? This time of all times, why should I not fly from you now
? It was no jest, but an open challenge.
It was not the first, but they had been coming too closely, one after the other, of late.
Vergilius no longer found such pranks amusing. He answered without delay, in his own
way, immediately. Yellow fire burned in the wetlands. The lionskin seared away, the
wizard stood free of the mire and raised his hand, speaking a single word.
The gray wings stiffened outward suddenly, their tips crackling. The sphynx pawed
the air madly, yowling as unseen bars stabbed into a cage around her. The woman's head
atop the hawk-winged lion's body bowed slowly, under the pressure of an invisible hand
whose might she fought every inch of the way. Defiance was useless. Her whole body was
brought inexorably back down to the earth, and the spell upon her compelled an unwilling
obeisance before the sorcerer.
"You will fly from me when I say," the magician said. "Not before."
 And when will that be? Thoughts hissed and burned. Vergilius had seen what the
sphynx's thoughts could do to the unprepared mind. In the little Theban village where
legend had lured him, they showed him a young shepherd whose flock had led him too
near a certain forbidden cavern in the hills. That shepherd now lay naked on a straw
pallet, so that the charitable souls who cared for him might clean him of his own wastes
more effectively. Saliva ran from the corners of his mouth as he babbled in a tongue
neither Latin nor Greek; saliva mixed with blood when a periodic frenzy shook him and
his own teeth pierced cheek and tongue. The villagers said he was fifteen.
Fifteen was too young to wander near that cave where the sphynx's dreaming
thoughts hung shadowy and hungry about the vine-overgrown adit like bats. They were
only the thoughts of her healing-time dreams, the thoughts of her slumbering rage, yet