"Carolyn Ives Gilman - The Honeycrafters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilman Carolyn Ives)

"Old wives' tales are there for a reason. Your bees will be fine this journey, but you will wear them out. You will get nothing from them next journey."
Renata shrugged. "It's this journey I'm worried about."
"A good holdmother always worries about next journey."
"Tell me that when I'm holdmother."
Yannas wanted to slap her. Irresponsible, self-confident girl, so full of her sense of control. She did not know how quickly events could take it from her. How could she know? She had never yet failed.
Hudin was whispering to Renata. He looked restless. Renata nodded. "Far better to hold her. Without her hivekeeper, Magwin Ghar would be doomed."
The words made Yannas' heart hum with anxiety. But she knew Renata, knew her too well. In a proud, slightly contemptuous tone she said, "It would be a dishonest way to win. Everyone would say you could not win fair."
They were the right words. Renata said, "She is right, Hudin. We don't need to use tricks. I have a better idea." She whispered into the young man's ear. He frowned, but turned and walked off. "Come with me," Renata said. "You will not leave without tasting our hospitality."
Renata's tent was spartan and functional, the tent of a field commander. But the food she served was good and plentiful, better than Yannas had eaten for journeypieces. She tried not to look like she was enjoying it.
As they were finishing the meal, Hudin came in with a honey pot. Renata opened it and spread some pale honey on a rice cracker. She held it out. "We just finished this blend."
Yannas took it, consumed with curiosity. It had a delicate aroma. "Sweet-memory," she said.
"Yes, we've got quite a lot of it."
Yannas let a drop of the sunshine-colored liquid fall onto her tongue, letting the smell drift up her nostrils. Then she bit into it.
The honey had been blended with striking originality. It was a simple formula that tasted of dawn and early blooms. It filled Yannas' mouth with a distillation of young things, long-legged flowers and a land that had never known failure. Memories rushed to her head. She could never make a honey like this. Not now.
"You like it?" Renata said.
Yannas looked down to hide her face. For the first time, she realized she might not win this contest. Renata had no expertise, but with simple green vitality she might prevail.
"I am no judge," Yannas said. "This is a young honey. Too young for me."
All the way home, as she pushed through the tall grass, the memory of that taste haunted her.


They had come to the sun-baked shortgrass prairie when the epidemic struck. It started among the children. One moment they were swimming and running half-dressed in the sun, brown as mud; the next they lay shaking with a fever, dry cough, and rash.
Reema, the apothecary, brought the diagnosis to Magwin Ghar's tent. The motherhold was camped by a wide, muddy river that meandered through the plains till it disappeared in the blue distance. Dubich had rolled up the sides of their tent to let in the cool eastern breeze, and now sat crosslegged, repairing some leather. The sun hung unblinking in the sky.
"Spotted fever," Reema said. "And I used the last of my hoarhoney today. We took a risk not going south to replenish our curative honeys. Our grandchildren may pay for our mistake."
Magwin Ghar said nothing to the reproach, but Dubich knew how she flinched inside. Everyone had something to blame her with these days.
"It is not too late to go south," she said.
"It is if we want to spend time gathering desert honeys."
"We can do both."
Dubich's bones ached at the thought. He said quietly, "It is a long way to the forests where the hoarflowers grow. We cannot get there and back again in time."
"We will have to," Magwin Ghar said doggedly. "I will not have my grandchildren die."
It was a hellish journeypiece. Half the motherhold was sick, the other half worn out with doctoring, yet Magwin still pushed them to travel fast. By the time they reached the forest, two children had died, and some said it was the journeying that did it.
"But if we hadn't hurried, more might have died," Magwin said desperately to Dubich. "What do they expect from me?"
They stayed to milk the hoarflowers only till the sickness had crested. When they turned wearily toward the desert again, they met other motherholds heading for the Erdrum market, their wagons heavy with brimming honey vats, ready to trade. A third of Yannas' formula was still ungathered.
Their last camp lay in a dusty canyon under the glaring forenoon sun. The desert flowers had never seemed more scattered or fleeting. Yannas worked like a fiend, scouting out the stands of flowers and checking the hives. She would come in after long, solitary trips, her hair and eyebrows white with desert dust, her face and hands black from the sun. Then she would work feverishly with Dubich in the hot mixing tent, experimenting with new combinations whose ingredients she refused to reveal.
The boys who went out to fetch in the combs told of a pungent odor emanating from the trays Yannas had placed in the hives. Their grandmothers hushed them and said, "Don't you repeat stories like that." When Dubich mentioned the rumor to Magwin Ghar, she simply said, "I don't believe it." But her eyes said she did, and didn't care.
But there was another secret Yannas kept closer. There was one hive whose location no one but she knew. On the edge of a wind-scoured gully she had found a stand of spike-leaved plants, spiral cones with a single white flower on top. The first time she came upon them, she stood looking for a long time. Their name was sinnom, and it did not appear on any lawful formula. A few drops of honey from this plant would bring such pleasure and comfort that a lifetime of happiness crowded into a minute could not equal it.
The smell of sinnom honey came back to her as vividly as if it were yesterday. She had kept it in a thin-necked green bottle. At first she had taken it only in leisure, lying entranced in its spell instead of sleeping. Then she had started taking it in waking times, and all the little miseries and defeats of life became lost in its glow. The honey had been her success, her fulfillment. She could see it even now, the color of gold and more precious, the antidote to everything.
She turned away, feeling the aching cavity the sinnom had left. She stumbled blindly down the path toward the nearest hive. When she reached it she seized one of the guard bees from the entrance. Furious, it stung her hand, and she sank to her knees, clutching her wrist, letting the pain burn through her till it had cauterized her nerves. Then she closed up the hive, strapped it to her back, and cursing herself, moved it to the gully where the sinnom plants stood.
Since then, the bees had slowly been filling their hive with the priceless, deadly nectar. Whenever she came to check the hive, Yannas soaked a rag in liquor and tied it over her face to keep herself from smelling its intoxicating perfume. She told herself she needed it only for insurance, only as a last resort. She would never take it again.
The combs filled too slowly, and time passed too fast. At last they had to take what scant honey they could get. The hives were brought in and the half-filled combs were taken out and marked; then, in the busy extractor tent, workers loaded the cylindrical comb frames one by one into the spinner. Everyone took turns pushing the treadle lever that kept the spinner constantly going through sleep and waking, till all the combs were empty.
They were the last motherhold to arrive in Erdrum. The broad plain south of the city bubbled with white dome tents as if someone had lathered it with soap. All the shady camp spots were taken, so Magwin Ghar's motherhold had to camp on a sun-baked spot far from the well. As they moved slowly to erect their tents, her people looked like leaves blown in off the desert: dry, dusty, cracked-leather-skinned. They were like wizened relics among the crowds of visitors and shoppers.
Their task was far from over. As soon as the mixing tent was erected, a new stage began. The pots of labeled honeys were sorted and strained; then Dubich banished all visitors but Yannas and set about the task of measuring and mixing. His worktable was a labyrinth of glass vessels, gleaming with bottled sunlight. Each honey had its signature: clear as water, milky as wax, diamond, gold, garnet, and amber. Some were thick as reluctant syrup, others poured like wine. Some were sweet, others spiced or heady. He knew them all.
Every motherhold in the huge camp soon knew of the strange battle brewing. As he toiled side by side with Yannas, scarcely sleeping, Dubich knew the other honeycrafters were probably sitting around their campfires speculating on strategy. Would the combatants gamble on one of the new spiced blends -- Amberfoil, perhaps, or Cinnabar? Would they modify their stronger honeys by heating them first, or use them raw? Would they strive for a striking color, or emphasize bouquet and flavor? Through the haze of weariness Dubich sometimes smiled to think how surprised they would be.
For it was a honey like no other. As he tasted and tested, Dubich alternated between manic confidence and fear. Sometimes he thought it was inspired. At others, insane.
Word came that Renata had visited Magwin's tent to bargain over the time and place of the contest, the identities and number of the judges.
"She was shrewd," Magwin said when he came, exhausted, to her tent to rest. "I wonder what happened to that reckless youngster who came down out of the hills." As he drifted off to sleep his last sight was of Magwin curled on her cushions like a wily old lizard. Her hair had gone entirely white since the journey started.
Yannas could not sleep. She had been at Dubich's side for many whiles; now she sat alone in the closely guarded mixing tent. Her masterwork was almost done. She dipped a tasting-stick into the glass beaker and let a drop of honey fall onto her tongue. A drama of conflicting flavors unfolded in her mouth. Dark, brooding spices followed by a tingle of shattercup like the near passage of death; then a hint of aftertaste, fleeting as intuition, that might be fresh-born flowers, and might not. It was a masterful honey; but one addition could make it irresistible. Hidden deep in her inside pocket was a small flask of sinnom honey. She had extracted it herself when Dubich was asleep in his tent. One drop mixed into the pot would be impossible to detect. But it would make the judges crave the honey beyond reason, yearn to recapture the taste as if it were youth itself.
The flask felt hard against her ribs. She rose and walked out into the hot sun, her eyes burning from dust and overwork. She wandered aimlessly among the tents, past a boy washing clothes and a noisy marriage party, past a jeweler from the city hawking golden bees.
"Yannas No-Name," a voice said at her side. She turned and saw Bosna, Reema's daughter, who had left a journey ago to become one of Renata's troup.
"Is your honey ready?" the girl asked. But no, she was no longer a girl. There were frown lines in her forehead and her mouth had a pinched look.
"Almost," Yannas said, distrusting the woman.