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

Now spring was here again, and since the winter the sometime studs were out living on the ridges and
running rocks and wrestling for the right to claim favor here in the wooded valleys. We were back on
Big Man, taking another step toward Heaven, and Ma'am decided the lolly had to go up.

The studs' weaves and dyes had fallen off over the winter, and it was just a dented circle again, with the
curves shaved off to eight straight edges, still a bit of red underneath -- a fortune of metal in its face and
the stick below. That metal had been the real value of the studs' gift, of course, but men like them will lay
eyes on a color and forget everything that matters.

And there's me at one end of the pulling rope, and Inker up on the scaffold and someone's found some
good line Ma'am had us trade downriver for -- though there was grumbling about losing tenweight of
cured salmon for something you couldn't even rightly chew let alone swallow. And there's the lolly
swinging from the new deck pulley and Inker and two boyos guide it in and Miracle -- she's our
girl-woman -- takes that traded-for line with its memory of the taste of salmon and lashes the lolly to one
of Big Man's ribs, on the inside, where it might serve him for a heart.

Damn all our eyes if that lolly don't rattle in the wind, and shift around to find a good place to hang its
weight on the traded-for line, and thump three times on the rib like it just might be a heart.

Ma'am stirred in her sandbed, which I knew on account of the shouting and yelling, and four of the boyos
helped her in her hundredweights out of her grotto, and she put her thigh bone whistle to her lips and
belted out the tune for a festival.

"It's a sign," called Inker in his old-folded voice, though it carried loud as any falling tree. "Big Man's
going to wake from dreaming some day soon, and carry us all to Heaven on His shoulders!"

Then they swarmed down from the scaffold, Inker and the boyos and Miracle, and even Preach found a
stale little smile somewhere to wear on his face for a while.

We danced reels among the barley shoots, and we did the watersnake below the beavers' second dam,
and we sung down the sun with a rowdy even chant fueled by last autumn's corn wine and this spring's
first berry beer, and then we sung up the moon like a pack of coyotes, yipping and howling until the furry
brothers in the hills howled back. It was the best party we'd had in a while, the kind of noise that would
attract the sometime studs back from their lonely heights. "Winter's good and over, studs," our singing
said, and our stomping feet set the tread that called them in.

Long about the middle hours the littler boyos had gone to sleep in the fir branches, and most of the bigger
ones were thrashing together in the bushes or night swimming with the beavers. I found myself sharing a
basket of shallots with Miracle, who I ain't never been alone with to talk to.

"You believe in Big Man, Larkin Grouselegs?" she asked, the greens crunching in her mouth and making
us both smell like a freshet.

"He's right there," I said, waving toward the scaffolding. I set my arm back down, kind of on accident
touching hers, so our little goose bumps rubbed together, and my fine pale hairs tingled.

Even with the shallots, she smelled better than any boyo. Different, kind of a crisp, sharp smell, like
warm snot and worksweat and blood and flowers all mixed together. Last fall she'd taken to wearing
hide shirts over her wool kilts, about the time she got tall as most of the boyos.