"A Pool In The Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

A Pool in the Desert a short story by Robin McKinleyA Pool in the Desert
Robin McKinley
A story of Damar



Robin McKinley was born in Ohio and grew up all over the world because her
father was in the army. She now lives in the south of England with her husband,
writer Peter Dickinson. She is the author of several fantasy novels published
for young adults but loved by readers of all ages, including Beauty, Rose
Daughter, The Blue Sword (a Newbery Honor Book), and The Hero and the Crown
(winner of the Newbery Medal). Her most recent novel is SpindleТs End, based on
the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. McKinleyТs short fiction has been published in
The Door in the Hedge, A Knot in the Grain, and Water: Tales of Elemental
Spirits. The latter volume is the first book in a projected series based on the
four elements, written in collaboration with her husband.
УA Pool in the DesertФ first appeared in Water. The story is loosely connected
to McKinleyТs УDamarФ novels (The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown), though
readers neednТt be familiar with Damar to enjoy this fine work of traditional
fantasy.
ЧTerri Windling
(intro to entry in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Annual
Collection



There were no deserts in the Homeland. Perhaps that was why she dreamed of
deserts. She had had her first desert dreams when she was quite young, and still
had time to read storybooks and imagine herself in them; but deserts were only
one of the things she dreamed about in those days. She dreamed about knights in
armour and glorious quests, and sometimes in these dreams she was a knight and
sometimes she was a lovely lady who watched a particular knight and hoped that,
when he won the tournament, it would be she to whom he came, and stooped on
bended knee, andЕ and sometimes she dreamed that she was a lady who tied her
hair up and pulled a helmet down over it and over her face, and won the
tournament herself, and everyone watching said, Who is that strange knight? For
I have never seen his like. After her mother fell ill and she no longer had time
to read, she still dreamed, but the knights and quests and tournaments dropped
out of her dreams, and only the deserts remained.
For years in these desert dreams she rode a slender, graceful horse with an
arched neck, and it flew over the sand as if it had wings; but when she drew up
on the crest of a dune and looked behind her, there would be the shallow
half-circles of hoofprints following them, hummocking the wind-ridges and
bending the coarse blades of the sand-grass. Her horse would dance under her,
splashing sand, and blow through red nostrils, asking to gallop on, but she
would wait for the rest of her party, less wonderfully mounted, toiling behind
her. Then she would turn again in the direction they were all going, and shade
her eyes with one hand, talking soothingly to her restless horse through the
reins held lightly in the other; and there would be the dark shadow of mountains
before her, mountains she knew to call the Hills.