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

had thinned but not toughened, its lustrous silver fine as spun flax. When
she brushed it at night, it fell around her sagging breasts like a shower of
light.
Something was happening to the voices on the wind. They spun their
wordless threads more strongly, more distinctly, especially outside the
castle. Rose slept little now, and often she sat in the stableyard through
the long unchanging summer afternoon, listening. Corwin slept beside her, his
long lashes throwing shadows on his downy cheeks. She watched him, and
listened to the spinning wind, and sometimes her lined face turned slowly in a
day-long arc, as if following a different sun than the one that never moved.
"Corwin," she said in her quavery voice, "did you hear that?"
The wind hummed over the cobblestones, stirred the forelock of the
sleeping roan.
"There are almost words, Corwin. No, better than words."
His chest rose and fell.
"I am old, Corwin. Too old. Princes are much younger men."
Sunlight tangled in his fresh black curls.
"They aren't really supposed to be words. Are they."
Rose creaked to her feet. She walked to the stableyard well. The oak
bucket swung suspended from its windlass, empty. Rose put a hand on the
winch, which had become very hard for her twisted hands to turn, and closed
her eyes. The wind spun past her, then through her. Her ears roared. The
bucket descended of itself, filled with water. Cranked back up. Rose opened
her eyes.
"Ah," she said quietly. And then, "So."
The wind blew.
She hobbled through the stableyard gate to the Hedge. One hand she
laid on it, and closed her eyes. The wind hummed in her head, barely rustling
the summer grass.
When she opened her eyes, nothing about the Hedge had changed.
"So," Rose said, and went back into the bailey, to dust the royal
guard.
But each day she sat in the the wordless wind, or the wind whose words
were not what mattered, or in her own mind. And listened.
****
No prince had arrived for decades. A generation, Rose decided; a generation
who knew the members of the retinue led by the young royal on the black horse.
But that generation must grow older, and marry, and give birth to children,
and one day a trumpet sounded and men shouted and banners snapped in the wind.
It took Rose a long time to climb the tower staircase. Often she
paused to rest, leaning against the cool stone, hand pressed to her heart. At
the top she paused again, to look curiously around her old room, the one place
she never cleaned. The bedclothes lay dirty and sodden on the stained floor.
Rose picked them up, folded them across the bed, and hobbled to a stone
window.
The prince had just begun to hack at the Hedge. He was the handsomest
one yet: hair and beard of deep burnished bronze, dark blue doublet strained
across strong shoulders, silver fittings on epaulets and sash. Rose's vision
had actually improved with age; she could see his eyes. They were the green
of stained-glass windows in bright sun.