"Nancy Kress - Summer Wind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

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Summer Wind
by Nancy Kress
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Copyright (c)1995 Nancy Kress
First published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, editors Ellen Datlow and Terri
Windling, Avon, 1995

Fictionwise Contemporary
Fantasy


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Sometimes she talked to them. Which of course was stupid, since they
could neither hear nor answer. She talked anyway. It made the illusion of
company.
Her favorite to talk to was the stableboy, frozen in the stableyard
beside the king's big roan, the grooming brush still in his upraised hand.
The roan was frozen too, of course, brown eyes closed, white forelock blowing
gently in the summer wind. She used to be a little frightened of the roan, so
big it was, but not of the stableboy, who had had merry red lips and wide
shoulders and dark curling hair.
He had them still.
Every so often she washed off a few of them: the stableboy, or the cook
beside his pots, or the lady-in-waiting sewing in the solarium, or even the
man and woman in the north bedchamber, locked in naked embrace on the wide
bed. None of them ever sweated or stank, but still, there was the dust --
dust didn't sleep -- and after years and years the people became coated in
fine, gray powder. At first she tried to whisk them clean with a serving
maid's feather duster, but it was very hard to dust eyelashes and earlobes.
In the end she just threw a pot of water over them. They didn't stir, and
their clothes dried eventually, the velvets and silks a little stiff and
water-marked, the coarse-weaved breeches and skirts of the servants none the
worse off. Better, maybe. And it wasn't as if any of them would catch cold.
"There you are," she said to the stableboy. "Now, doesn't that feel
better? To be clean?"
Water glistened in his black curls.
"I'm sure it must feel better."
A droplet fell onto his forehead, slid over his smooth brown cheeks,
came to rest in the corner of his mouth.