"Barry N. Malzberg & Kathe Koja - Orleans, Rheims, Friction Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

France leaping from her windowed self: witch: soon enough.

And she says nothing, adding the warder's name to that long list which lives
within her, the ones for whom she must pray: the indifferent, the evil, the
liars, the silent, the ones who say this thing and mean another, the sheep and
the sheep and the goats. A sheep's wool smells musty in moisture like this, rain
like the rain she hears falling outside: death all around her from the skies and
inward from the fire, a long, long time since she has walked thus, wet grass to
hiss in motion like the gown of a fine lady, fine Joan, elegant Joan with a
sound of silk and arch of bosom. Not my lady soldier in her boots and gauntlets,
leading her weary horse, her weary men, how did it happen so? Witch, witch, the
tower warder's laughter or perhaps it is she who makes the sound, uneven breath
the rachet whisper of that laugh. Oh, go back, make the journey, think again:
one day crouched small amidst hummocks and gray skies, counting her beads on her
fingers, here Mary, here Michael, here the lower blessed saints and the muted
grumble of the flock entrusted and the next the center of men who followed as
simply, as singly as the sheep, her name their ave, her living flesh their
standard: oh how had such a thing ever happened to her? Voices, they said, she
hears voices, she hears the voice of God Himself telling her what to do: but
that was wrong: the voices were one thing, instructions, directions, those she
had been eager to follow, obey the light behind their light: but not God, never
God, never that unmediated ave, the cry of God resounding but instead -- and
what had she done, what evil made manifest in her own clumsy work for good that
she should be so persecuted -- instead to her the stricken, the betrayed, the
slowly evaporating Christ stumbling on the stones and whispering his frightened
cries into her heart, cries then to pass through the filters of her own station
and become instead a claim for France, salve Franco, salve Gaul and it was this,
the whimpers of the betrayed Jesus, which had at last so fully told her exactly
not what she must do but what she was, had become, had always been even there in
the fields and the water no less than here in the water and the stone: there
might as well have been no God at all, God hung somewhere behind the shroud of
sky and his disciples as unquestioning as her own, her followers his, his Son
her passport to this abandonment, the rest only brute forms of men surrounding
her, carrying her to her own place, the place inside the fire.

And yet the rain, slow and steady on the walls to press upon her as did the
pressure of prayer inside her head, that unvoiced cry, that voiced desire, blood
in the bone, bone in the body, body a prison of bones made of terror and desire,
the same desire which had nailed Christ to the cross of wood: to escape the void
and the darkness, to do the work of the Lord.

"Hi again," near-silent hiss of the screen door, beside her now on the porch the
unfrocked priest with a drink for her, a glass of pink champagne. "Oh, you
should hear them," he says, handing her the glass which she accepts to set at
once upon the porch, between her feet without comment or thanks. "They're going
nuts in there, Martin Luther's arguing free will with Marilyn Monroe."

"Marilyn Monroe's not a real person," she says. "Image concrete, no?"
"Well," he says after a pause, "she's supposed to be real. Anyway there they
are, the two of them, made for each other." His smile a supplicant's slyness,