"Jay Lake - Crimson Mud, Drying Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

Crimson Mud, Drying Blood
by Jay Lake




We lashed the lolly to Big Man's bones the day I turned fourteen, same morning I got my facing done.

Ma'am had sent for the best Inker within six days' walk, with his three bone needles and one of iron and
secret inks from clays within the sacred banks of the Flywater River. Dawn abloomin' in the east, four of
Ma'am's other boyos held me down and Inker-man chewed his leaves until his eyes rolled back with a
cry like a hawk's, then blind and trembling drew my destiny upon my face in tiny stabs that hurt so good I
cried to laugh.

Then they let me up, packed my face with mud and grass and swore me off washing or looking in pools
of water for a week and a day, and we all went back to Big Man. Even Inker climbed up to do a turn on
the scaffolds, old-folded as he was by time and sunlight to a piece of drawn-ass hide.

Ain't it great, how you start out life pretty and you end up wise, but the two are like a river's head and
mouth -- the springs never meet the sea.

There I was, face itching like someone had laid a masking chantry on me, anchoring the far end of the
load rope while the lolly went up. It was medium hard work, and I welcomed the salty sweat and the
arm strain to keep my thoughts from my face.

We had us good metal pulleys, found deep in a hole by the Tunnel Runners and brought up to advance
Big Man's dreaming years so much the faster. Our pulling ropes weren't half the worth, like as not break
if you hefted a hundredweight, but by river and forest, them pulleys would outlive us all.

They had already, hadn't they? Outlived the Little Men who made them, scratching at the metal with fine
files and tiny saws in their stone caves of long ago, before light came into the world for good and all.

Up went the lolly, me holding down the rope with three boyos pulling in front of me, past the first deck of
the scaffold, and past the mountain deck -- so called on account of you could see the mountains good
from there -- and past the high deck, and past the hawks' deck and on to the new deck, which was
always the top deck of the scaffold no matter whether it had been built further or stood for years. The
lolly itself was a work of art, wrested from a gnarled old cypress that grew over a slab of Little Man
blackstone. It was one of Ma'am's sometime studs that done the deed, after a weasel showed him the
way in dreaming.

The sometime stud, it might have been Barkdust Bill, I forget 'cause Ma'am drove them all off come last
winter so as only to have her boyos' mouths to fill instead of her bedmates' beautiful, useless bellies, he
drug that thing home still crusted in roots and bark and dirt and shiny bits of blackstone. Bill and the
other studs cleaned it off and freshened it with flower dyes and little secret weaves they had the making
of, and presented it to Ma'am like she was to have some doing or other with it.

Ma'am, she laughed her real laugh, not her festival laugh, and had some of us boyos who were dancing
attendance on her lay it in the high place above her sandbed, then she invited her sometime studs in and
we drew the leafy curtains and they squealed until sundown, missing evenchant and nearly missing
moonrise chant. Preach wasn't happy, but he ain't never happy.