"Gregory Maguire - Mirror Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maguire Gregory)

Vigil

1519
Tha├пs
Fire and ivy
The heart of the matter
Montefiore
Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Gregory Maguire
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
 The roofs of Montefiore



F ROM THE arable river lands to the
south, the approach to Montefiore appears a sequence of relaxed hills. In the late spring, when the
puckers of red poppy blossom are scattered against the green of the season, it can look like so much
washing, like mounds of Persian silk and Florentine brocade lightly tossed in heaps. Each successive rise
takes on a new color, indefinably more fervent, an aspect of distance and time stained by the shadows of
clouds, or bleached when the sun takes a certain position.

But the traveler on foot or in a hobble-wheeled peasant cart, or even on horseback, learns the truth of
the terrain. The ascent is steeper than it looks from below. And the rutted track traverses in long
switchbacks to accommodate for the severity of the grade and the crosscutting ravines. So the trip takes
many more hours than the view suggests. The red-tiled roofs of Montefiore come into sight, promisingly,
and then they disappear again as hills loom up and forests close in.

Often I have traveled the road to Montefiore in memory. Today I travel it in true time, true dust, true air.
When the track lends me height enough, I can glimpse the villaтАЩs red roofs above the ranks of poplars,
across the intervening valleys. But I canтАЩt tell if the house is peopled with my friends and my family, or
with rogues who have murdered the servants in their beds. I canтАЩt tell if the walls below the roofline are
scorched with smoke, or if the doors are marked with an ashy cross to suggest that plague has come to
gnaw the living into their mortal rest, their last gritty blanket shoveled over their heads.

But I have come out of one death, the one whose walls were glass; I have awakened into a second life
dearer for being both unpromised and undeserved. Anyone who walks from her own grave relies on the
unexpected. Anyone who walks from her own grave knows that death is more patient than Ges├╣ Cristo.
Death can afford to wait.

But now the track turns again, and my view momentarily spins back along the slopes IтАЩve climbed so far.
My eye traces the foothills already gained, considers the alphabet of light that spells its unreadable words
on the surface of the river. My eye also moves along the past, to my early misapprehensions committed
to memory on this isolated outcropping.

The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.