"Patricia A. McKillip - The Old Woman and the Storm" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

have seen her first. When I was a child. Or in another time. The world-"
"Could you ever look at me like that?"

He leaned back, sighing again. He was silent, drawing his name on the ground in the dust, feeling the air in
his lungs, the blood beat in his fingertips. "All right," he said after awhile, his voice detached, faraway.
"You can kill me now. But first stop the storm."

She only growled something and the thump of ice in the dark sounded louder. Many living things would
be left looking for shapes that night. He gazed at her, bewildered.

"Then what do you want?"

"Well, look at me! I am rain! I am thunder, I am lightning, I am bitter, bitter winds├СI never have choices!
Make me another shape. One that will move you to look at me the way you look at the Sun." She waved
her pipe again, and the lightning swarn over Arram's amazed face. "Do that, and the storm will stop "

"I'm only a man," Arram protested. "I walk naked in the world. I kill lizards and paint rocks and then I
die. I have no power."

"But you don't know what power you might have had. In another time." She snapped her fingers
impatiently and thunder rolled. "Think! Remember."

Arram tried to think. But each time he tried, the thunder snarled and the lightning spat. He could only
think of the quiet river with ice-eggs smashing into it, the forest bruised and broken by the storm. He
couldn't remember a life of magic power. He didn't even know anyone who could remember. The Old
Woman herself was the most powerful being he had ever seen. More powerful it seemed, even than the
lovely Sun, who had fled trom this storm. Maybe, he thought suddenly, the Old Woman is so strong, so
angry, that she never sees the simple world. How can she? She throws fire at it, she rains on it. Maybe if
I tell her what I see she'll believe that I will have to die to make the storm stop, because I can't help her.

So he said, "In my forest there are red flowers, so big they overflow two hands. They are very beautiful,
with many petals reaching toward the sky." The Old Woman was beginning to look annoyed. Her white
brows flew together and a boulder crashed down the cliff outside. Arram cleared his throat and
continued hurriedly. "They weren't always flowers. Once they were all young women who had no lovers.
They cried and pleaded for lovers, but all the young men had died in a battle, and no one knew what to
do. One day the great black Hunting Beetle came to them and said, 'I'll be your lover. The only lover all
of you will ever need.' And of course they laughed and threw stones at him, making him scurry into a hole
so he wouldn't get squashed. That night he crawled back out and looked wistfully over all the arms and
legs and breasts of the sleeping women, all of whom he loved at once. He wished for them, and wished,
and they sobbed in their sleep for the young men who would never come. And his desire and their
sorrow kindled a magic between them, for all things are connected and the earth takes care of its own. In
the morning, where the young women had laid, grew the loveliest flowers in the world. The beetle had his
wish. And so did the young women: for even today the Hunting Beetle roams over all the flowers in the
forest, feeding on their honey and freeing their seeds to the wind. "

He stopped, feeling a little confused. He had meant to tell the Old Woman a simple story, but this had a
magic in it he had never noticed. She was watching him puzzledly, puffing brief puffs on her pipe. The
terrible sound of the ice storm seemed to have lessened a little. The Old Woman said finally, "That's no
use to me. I wish and I wish, and nothing ever listens to me. But tell me another one."