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

She weaved and sewed and embroidered new clothes for every sleeper in
the castle, hundreds of people. Pages and scullery maids and mummers and
knights and ladies and the chapel priest and the king's fool, for whom she
made a parti-colored doublet embroidered with small sharp thorns. She weaved
clothes for the chancellor and the pastry chef and the seneschal and the
falconer and the captain of the guards and the king and queen, asleep on their
thrones. For herself Rose weaved a simple black dress and wore it every day.
Sometimes, tugging a chemise or kirtle or leggings over an unresisting
sleeping body, she almost heard voices on the summer breeze. Voices, but no
words.
She spun and weaved and embroidered sixteen hours a day, for years.
She frowned as she worked, and a line stitched itself across her forehead,
perpendicular to the lines in her neck. Her golden hair fell forward and
interferred with the spinning and so she bound it into a plait, and saw the
gray among the gold, and shoved the plait behind her back.
She had finished an embroidered doublet for a sous-cook and was about
to carry it to the kitchen when she heard a great noise without the walls.
Slowly, with great care, Rose laid the sous-cook's doublet neatly on
the polished Gallery floor. Slowly, leaning against the stone wall to ease
her arthritic left knee, she climbed the circular stairwell to her bedchamber
in the tower.
He attacked the Hedge from the northwest, and he had brought a great
retinue. At least two dozen young men hacked and slashed, while squires and
pages waited behind. Flags snapped in the wind; horses pawed the ground; a
trumpet blared. Rose had no trouble distinguishing the prince. He wore a
gold circlet in his glossy dark hair, and the bridle of his golden horse was
set with black diamonds. His sword hacked and slashed faster than the
others', and even from the high tower, Rose could see that he smiled.
She unfurled the banner she had embroidered, fierce yellow on black,
with the two curt words: BE GONE! None of the young men looked up. Rose
flapped the banner, and a picture flashed through her mind, quick as the
prince's sword: her old nurse, shaking a rug above the moat, freeing it of
dust.
The prince and his men continued to hack at the Hedge. Rose called out
-- after all, she could hear them, should they not be able to hear her? Her
voice sounded thin, pale. She hadn't spoken in years. The ghostly words
disappeared in the other voices, the wordless ones on the summer wind. No one
noticed her.
The prince fell into the Hedge, and the screaming began, and Rose bowed
her head and prayed for them, the lost souls, the ones for whom she would
never spin doublets or breeches or whispered smiles like the one on the woman
with hacked-off hair asleep in her shared bed in the north chamber.
Her other dead.
****
After years, decades, everyone in the castle was clothed, and dusted, and
pillowed on embroidered cushions rich with intricate designs in
jewelled-colored thread. The pewter in the kitchen gleamed. The wooden floor
of the Long Gallery shone. Tapestries hung bright and clean on the walls.
Rose no longer sat at the spinning wheel. Her fingers were knotted and
twisted, the flesh between them thin and tough as snakeskin. Her hair, too,