"Patricia A. McKillip - The Gorgon in the Cupboard" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

He whispered, "Medusa."
"Me," she said. "Open the door."
He opened it.


DOWN by the river, Jo huddled with the rest of the refuse, all squeezed under a butcher's awning trying to get out
of the sudden squall. In the country, where she had walked from, the roads turned liquid in the rain; carriages, wagons,
horses, herds of sheep and cows churned them into thick, oozing welts and hillocks of mud deep enough to swallow
your boots if you weren't careful. Here the cobbles, though hard enough, offered some protection. At least she was off
her aching feet. At least until the butcher saw what took up space from customers looking in his windows and drove
them off. Jo had been walking that day since dawn to finish her journey to the city. It was noon now, she guessed,
though hard to tell. The gray sky hadn't changed its morose expression by so much as a shift of light since sunrise.
Someone new pushed into the little group cowering under the awning. Another drenched body, nearly faceless
under the rags wrapped around its head, sat leaning against Jo's shoulder, worn shoes out in the rain. It wore skirts;
other than that it seemed scarcely human, just one more sodden, miserable, breathing thing trying to find some
protection from life.
They all sat silently for a bit, listening to the rain pounding on the awning, watching the little figures along the
tide's edge, gray and shapeless as mud in their rags, darting like birds from one poor crumb of treasure the river left
behind to the next. Bits of coal they stuffed into their rags to sell, splinters of wood, the odd nail or frayed piece of
rope.
The bundle beside Jo murmured, "At least they're used to being wet, aren't they? River or rain, it's all one to them."
Her voice was unexpectedly young. Jo turned, maneuvering one shoulder out from beneath a sodden back. She
saw a freckled girl's face between wet cloth wrapped down to her eyebrows' up to her lower lip. One eye, as blue as
violets, looked resigned, calm. The other eye was swollen shut and ringed by all the colors of the rainbow.
Jo, her own face frozen for so long it hardly remembered how to move, felt something odd stirring in her. Vaguely
she remembered it. Pity or some such, for all the good it did.
She said, "Whoever gave you that must love you something fierce."
"Oh, yes," the girl said. "He'll love me to death one of these days. If he finds me again."
There was a snort from the figure on the other side of Jo. This one sounded older, hoarse and wheezy with illness.
Still she cackled, "I'd one like that. I used to collect my teeth in a bag after he knocked them out. I was so sorry to lose
them, I couldn't bear to give them up. I was that young, then. Never smart enough to run away, even when I was young
enough to think there might be a place to run to."
"There's not," Jo said shortly. "I ran back home to the country. And now I'm here again."
"What will you do?" the girl asked.
 Jo shrugged. "Whatever I can."
"What have you done?"
"Mill work in the country. I had to stop doing that when my mother died and there was no one else toтАФtoтАФ"
"Care for the baby?" the old woman guessed shrewdly.
Jo felt her face grow cold again, less expression on it than on a brick. "Yes. Well, it's dead now, so it doesn't
matter."
The girl sucked in her breath. "Cruel," she whispered.
"After that I got work at one of the big houses. Laundry and fires and such. But that didn't last."
"Did you get your references, though?"
"No. Turned out without."
"For what? Stealing?"
"No." Jo leaned her head back against the wall, watched rain running like a fountain over the edge of the swollen
awning. "I wasn't that smart."
The old woman gave her crow-cackle again. "Out of the frying panтАФ"
Jo nodded. "Into the fire. It would have been, if I hadn't run away. If I'd stayed, I'd have had another mouth to feed
when they turned me out. So I came back here."