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

her tower chamber. Blankets draped the two stone windows, darkening the room
almost to blackness. She descended the stone steps only to visit the storage
rooms. The rest of the long hours, she lay on her bed and drank the wine
stored deep in the cool cellars under the castle. Days and nights came and
went, and she lifted the gold goblet to her lips and let the red
foregetfulness slide down her throat and tried not to remember. Anything.
After the first unmemoried months of this, she caught sight of herself
in her mirror. She found another blanket to drape over the treacherous glass.
But stil the chamberpot must be emptied occasionally, although not very
often. Rose shoved aside the blanket over the south window and leaned far out
to dump the reeking pot into the moat far below. Her bleary eyes caught the
flash of a sword.
He was red-headed this time, hair the color of warm flame. His horse
was black, his sword set with green stones. Emeralds, perhaps. Or jade.
Rose watched him, and not a muscle of her face moved.
The prince slashed at the Hedge, rising in his stirrups, swinging his
mighty sword with both hands. The air rang with his blows. His bright hair
swirled and leaped around his strong shoulders. Then his left leg caught on a
thorn and the Hedge dragged him forward. The screaming started.
Rose let the edge of the blanket drop and stood behind it, the
unemptied chamber pot splashing over her trembling hands. She thought she
heard sobs, the dry juiceless sobs of the very old, but of course the chamber
was empty.
****
She lost a year. Or maybe more than a year; she couldn't be sure. There was
only the accumulation of dust to go by, thick on the Gallery floor, thick on
the sleeping bodies. A year's worth of drifting dust.
When she came again to herself, she lay outside, on the endlessly green
summer grass. Her naked body was covered with scars. She walked, dazed,
through the castle. Clothes on the sleepers had been slashed to ribbons.
Mutilated doublets, breeches, sleeves, redingotes, kirtles. Blood had oozed
from exposed shoulders and thighs where the knife had cut too deep, blood now
dried on the sleeping flesh. In the north bedchamber, the long tumbled hair
of the woman had been hacked off, her exposed scalp clotted with blood, her
lips still smiling as she slept in her lover's arms.
Rose stumbled, hand to her mouth, to the stableyard. Corwin sat beside
the big roan, black curls unshorn, tunic unslashed. Beside him, ripped and
bloody, lay Rose's own dress, the blue dress with pink forget-me-nots she had
worn for the ball on her sixteenth birthday.
She buried it, along with all the other ruined clothing and the bloody
rags from washing the clotted wounds, in a deep hole beside the Hedge.
On the wind, old women keened.
Although the spinning wheel was heavy, she dragged it down the tower
stairs to the Long Gallery. For a moment she looked curiously at the sharp
needle, but for only a moment. The storage rooms held wool and flax, bales of
it, quintals of it. There were needles and thread and colored ribbon. There
were wooden buttons, and jeweled buttons, and carved buttons of a translucent
white said to be the teeth of far-away animals large enough to lay siege to a
magic Hedge. Briar Rose knew better, but she took the white buttons and
smoothed them between her fingers.