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

She looked around, and saw a table in the corner, and books upon it (were these the records he had been searching for stories like hers?), and several loose sheets of paper, and a pen. She stood upЧcarefully, prepared to be dizzyЧand gestured towards the table. Zasharan stood up with her. "May I?" she said. He nodded as anyone might nod, but he also made a gesture with his hand that was both obviously that of hospitality and equally not at allЧshe thought; her dream-thought thoughtЧlike the gesture she would have made if someone had asked her to borrow a sheet of paper.
She took a deep breath, and picked up the pen (which was enough like an old-fashioned fountain pen that she did not have to ask how to use it) and drew an airplane on the top sheet of paper. She was not an artist, but anyone in the world she knew would have recognised what she drew at once as an airplane.
Zasharan only looked at it, puzzled, worried, both slightly frowning and slightly smiling, and shook his head, and made another gesture, a gesture of unknowing, although not the shoulders raised and hands spread that she would have made (that she thought she would have made) in a similar situation.
Frustrated, she folded the sheet of paper, lengthwise in half, then folding the nose, the wingsЧshe threw it across the room and it flew over the round pool where the Eye waited, bumped into the wall on the far side and fell to the ground. "Paper airplane," she said.
"Paper glider." he agreed. He walked round the pool, and picked her airplane up, and brought it back to the table. He unfolded it, carefully, pressing the folds straight with his fingers, smoothing and smoothing the wrinkles the bumped nose had madeЧas if paper were rare and precious, she thought, refusing to follow that thought any fartherЧand then, quickly, he folded it again, to a new pattern, a much more complex pattern, and when he tossed his glider in the air it spun up and then spiralled down in a lovely curve, and lit upon the floor as lightly as a butterfly.
She looked at him, and there was a sick, frightened feeling in her throat. "When you travelЧlong distances," she said, "howЧhow do you go?" She could not bring herself to ask about cars and trucks and trains.
"We have horses and asses and ankaba," he said. "You may walk or ride or lead a beast loaded with your gear. We have guides to lead you. We have waggoners who will carry you and your possessions. There are coaches if you can afford them; they are fasterЧand, they say, more comfortable, but I would not count on this." He spoke mildly, as if this were an ordinary question, but his eyes were fixed on her face in such a way that made it plain he knew it was not.
Slowly she said, "What year is it, Zasharan?"
He said, "It is the year 3086, counting from the year Gasthamor came from the east and struck the Hills with the hilt of his sword, and the Well of the City of the Kings and Queens opened under the blow."
"Gasthamor," said Hetta, tasting the name.
"Gasthamor, who was the teacher of Oragh, who was the teacher of Semthara, who was the teacher of Frayadok, who was the teacher of Goriolo, who was the teacher of Luthe," said Zasharan.
Gasthamor, she repeated to herself. Goriolo, She doubted that the encyclopedia would tell the tale of the warrior-mage who struck the rock with the hilt of his sword and produced a flow of water that would last over three thousand years, but an encyclopedia of legends might. "YouЧyou said the Queen's City, once before," she said. "What is the name of your queen?"
"Fortunatar," he said. "Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing."
She woke to the sound of her own voice, murmuring, Gasthamor, Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing, the year 3086. Her heart was heavy as she went about her chores that day., and she told herself that this was only because it was two more days before she could go to the library again, and look up the kings and queens of Damar.
She made time to finish cleaning the pool at the back of the garden, hauling the blanket-weedЧnow a disgusting sticky brown matЧtwo heaped barrowloads of the stuffЧto the compost heap. When she was done, she knelt on the crazy paving that edged the pool, and dipped her dirty hands in the water. The sting of its coolness was friendly, energising; her head felt clearer and her heart lighter than it had in several days. She patted her face with one wet hand, letting the other continue to trail in the water, and she felt a tiny flicker against her palm. She looked down, and there was a newt, swimming back and forth in a tiny figure eight, the curl of one arc inside her slightly cupped fingers. She turned her hand so that it was palm up. and spread her fingers. It swam to the centre of her palm and stopped. She thought she could just feel the tickle of tiny feet against her skin.
She raised her hand very, very slowly; as the newt's crested back broke the surface of the water, it gave a frantic, miniature heave and scrabble, and she thought it would dive over the little rise made by the web between her forefinger and thumb, but it stilled instead, seeming to crouch and brace itself, as against some great peril. Now she definitely felt its feet: the forefeet at the pulse-point of her wrist, the rear on the pads at the roots of her fingers., the tail sliding off her middle finger between it and the ring finger. She found she was holding her breath.
She continued to raise her hand till it was eye level to herself; and the newt lifted its head and stared at her. Its eyes were so small, it was difficult to make out their colour: gold, she thought, with a vertical black pupil. The newt gave a tiny shudder and the startling red crest on its back lifted and stiffened.
They gazed at each other for a full minute. Then she lowered her hand again till it touched the pond surface, and this time the newt was gone so quickly that she stared at her empty palm, wondering if she had imagined the whole thing.
She heard bells ringing in her dreams that night, but they seemed sombre and sad. On the next night she thought she heard Zasharan's voice, but she was lost in the dark, and whichever way she turned, his voice came from behind her, and very far away.
She stormed around the supermarket the next day, and when she found herself at the check-out behind someone who had to think about which carefully designated bag each item went into, she nearly started throwing his own apples at him. She arrived at the library with less than half an hour left, but her luck had found her at last, for there was a computer free. Queens of Damar, she typed. There was a whirr, and a list of web sites which mentioned (among other things) internationally assorted queens apparently not including Damarian, paint varnishes, long underwear, and hair dressing salons, presented itself to her hopefully. She stared at the screen, avoiding asking something that would tell her what she feared. At last she typed: Who is the ruler of Damar today?
Instantly the screen replied: King Doroman rules with the Council of Five and the Parliament of Montaratur.
There was no help for it. Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing, she typed.
There was a pause while the computer thought about it. She must have looked as frustrated and impatient as she felt, because a librarian paused beside her and asked in that well-practised ready-to-go-away-without-taking-offense voice if she could be of service.
"I am trying to find out some information about the queen of Damar," she said.
"Damar? OhЧDariaЧohЧDamar. Someone else was just asking about Damar a few weeks ago. It's curious how much we don't hear about a country as big as it is. They have a king now, don't they? I seem to remember from the independence ceremonies. I can't remember if he had a wife or not."
The computer was still thinking. Hetta said, finding herself glad of the distraction, "The queen I want is Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing."
The librarian repeated this thoughtfully. "She sounds rather, hmm, poetical, though, doesn't she? Have you tried myths and legends?"
The computer had now hung itself on the impossible question of a poetical queen of Damar, and Hetta was happy to let the librarian lean over her and put her hands on the keyboard and wrestle it free. The librarian knew, too. how to ask the library's search engine questions it could handle, and this time when an answering screen came up, there was a block of text highlighted:
Shortly after this period of upheaval, Queen Fortunatar, later named of the Clear Seeing for the justice of her rulings in matters both legal and numinous, took her throne upon the death of her half-brother Linmath. Linmath had done much in his short life, and he left her a small but sound queendom which flourished under her hand. The remaining feuds were settled not by force of arms (nor by the trickery that had caught Linmath fatally unaware) but by weaponless confrontation before the queen and her counsellors; and fresh feuds took no hold and thus shed no blood. The one serious and insoluble menace of Fortunatar's time were the sandstorms in the Great Desert which were frequent and severe.
"Hmm," said the librarian, and scrolled quickly to the top of the document. An Introduction to the Legendary History of Damar:
All countries have their folk tales and traditions, but Damar is unusual in the wealth of these, and in the inextricable linkage between them and what western scholars call factual history. Even todayЕ
Hetta closed her eyes. Then she opened them again without looking at the computer screen, made a dramatic gesture of looking at her watch, and did not have to feign the start of horror when she saw what it was telling her. "Oh dearЧI really must goЧthank you so muchЧI will come back when I have more time." She was out the door before she heard what the librarian was asking her. Probably whether she wanted to print out any of what they had found.
No.
For three nights she did not dream at all, and waking was cruel. The one moment when her spirits lifted enough for her to feel a breeze on her face and pause to breathe the air with pleasure was one sunny afternoon when she went back to her pool and scrubbed the encircling paving. She scrubbed with water only, not knowing what any sort of soap run-off might do to the pond life, and she saw newts wrinkle the water with their passing several times. When she stopped to breathe deep, she thought she saw a newt with a red back hovering at the edge of the pond as if it were looking at her, and it amused her for another moment to imagine that all the newts she saw were just the one newt, swimming back and forth, keeping her company.
That night she dreamed again, but it was a brief and disturbing dream, when she sat at the edge of Zasharan's pool where the Watcher's Eye lay, and she strained to look into the water and see it looking out at her, but the water was dark and opaque, though she felt sure the Eye was there, and aware of her. She woke exhausted, and aching as if with physical effort.
She dreamed the same the next night, and the oppression and uselessness of it were almost too much to bear. Her head throbbed with the effort to peer through the surface of the water, and she fidgeted where she sat as if adjusting her body might help her to see, knowing this was not true, and yet unable to sit still nonetheless. There was a scratchy noise as she moved and resettled, and grit under her palms as she leaned on them. Sand. The ubiquitous Damarian desert sand; Zasharan had told her that usually there was no sand in the Watcher's chamber but that this year it had blown and drifted even there. She dragged her blind gaze from the water and refocussed on the sand at the edge of the pool: the same glittery, twinkly sand that had first given her her cruelly unfounded hope when she had woken at home with grains of it in her hands and nightdress.
She shifted her weight and freed one hand. Help me, she wrote in the sand at the edge of the pool, and as she raised her finger from the final e, the dream dissolved, and she heard the milk float in the street below, and knew she would be late with breakfast.
A fortnight passed, and she dreamed of Damar no more. She began to grow reaccustomed to her life above the furniture shop, housekeeper, cook, mender, minder, bookkeeper, dogsbodyЧnothing. Nobody. She would grow old like this. She might marry Ron or Tim; that would please her father, and tie one of them even more strongly to the shop. She supposed her father did not consider the possibility that she might not be tied to the shop herself; she supposed she did not consider the possibility either. She had raised no protest when her parents had sent Mrs. Halford and Mr. Jonah and the possibility of university and a career away; she could hardly protest now that she had a dream-world she liked better than this one and wished to go there. The paperback shelves at the grocery store testified to the popularity of dream-worlds readers could only escape to for a few hours in their imaginations. She wondered how many people dreamed of the worlds they read about in books. She tried to remember if there had been some book, some fairy-tale of her childhood, that had begun her secret love of deserts, of the sandstorm-torn time of Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing, of a landscape she had never seen with her waking eyes; she could remember no book and no tale her grandmother told that was anything like what she had dreamed.
It took three weeks, but Ruth finally managed to corner her one Saturday afternoon, hoeing the vegetable garden. "No you don't," she said as Hetta picked her hoe up hastily and began to move back towards the garden shed. "I want to talk to you, and I mean to do it. Those dreams you were having about Damar lit you up, and the light's gone off again. It's not just the price of the ticket, is it? We'd get the money somehow."
Hetta dropped the hoe blade back behind the cabbages, but left it motionless. "No," she muttered. "It's not just the money." Her fingers tightened on the handle, and the blade made a few erratic scrapes at the soil.
"Then what is it?"
Hetta steadied the blade and began to hoe properly. Ruth showed no sign of going away, so at last she said: "It doesn't matter. It was a silly idea anyway. Doing something because you dreamed about it."
Ruth made a noise like someone trying not to yell when they've just cracked their head on a low door. She stepped round the edge of the bed and seized Hetta's wrist in both hands. Ruth was smaller than Hetta. and spent her spare time in a lab counting beetles, but Hetta was surprised at the strength of her grasp. "Talk to me," said Ruth. "I have been worrying about you for years. Since Grandma died. You're not supposed to have to worry about your older sister when you're six. Don't you think I know you've saved my life? Father would have broken me like he breaks everyone he gets his hands on if I'd been the elderЧ like he broke Mum, like he's broken Dane, like he's broken Tim and Ron and they were even grown-upsЧand Lara's going., for all that she thinks she just wants to marry Dane. You are the only one of us who has been clever enough, or stubborn enough., to save a little bit of your soul from himЧmaybe Grandma did, when she was still alive I wasn't paying so much attention, maybe you learned it from herЧand I learned from you that it can be done. I know it, and Jeff does tooЧyou know, with that programming stuff he can do, he's already got half his university paid for. When the time comes, nobody'll be able to say no to him. We're going to be all rightЧand that's thanks to you. It's time to save yourself now. That little bit of your soul seems to live in that desert of yoursЧif I were a shrink instead of a biologist, I'm sure I could have a really good time with that metaphorЧI've wondered where you kept it. But you're going to lose it, now, after all, if you're not careful. What are you waiting for? Lara can learn to do the booksЧI'll tell Dane to suggest it, they'll both think it's a great ideaЧI'll teach her. We'll eat like hell, maybe, but there's only a year left for me and two for Jeff, and the rest of 'em are on their own. Who knows? Maybe Mum will get out of bed. Hetta. My lovely sister. Go. I'll visit you., wherever you end up."
Hetta stood trembling. In her mind's eye she saw Zasharan, sand, trees, bells, horses, tree-framed faces, the Eye, the pool. For a moment they were more real to her than the garden she stood in or the bruising grip on her wrist. She realised thisЧrealised it and lost it again as she recognised the landscape of her real lifeЧwith a pain so great, she could not bear it.
She burst into tears.
She was only vaguely aware of Ruth putting an arm round her shoulders and leading her back behind the storm-broken sunflower screen and sitting her clown at the pool's edge, vaguely aware of Ruth rocking her as she had many times rocked Ruth, years ago, when their mother had first taken to her bed and their father shouted all the time. She came slowly to herself again with her head on Ruth's breast, and Ruth's free hand trailing drops of cold water from the pond against her face.
She sat up slowly. Ruth waited. She began to tell Ruth everything., from the first dream. She stumbled first over saying Fortunatar's name: Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing. And she paused before she explained what had happened in the library the day before. "It's all imaginary. It's not only not real, it's not even historyЧit's just legends. I might as well be dreaming of King Arthur and Robin Hood and Puck of Pook's Hill and Middle Earth. IfЧif you're right that a little of my soul lives there, thenЧthen it's an imaginary soul too." Nothing, whispered her mind. Nothing but here, now, this. She looked at the walls around the garden; even from this, the garden's farthest point, she could hear the electric buzz of woodworking tools, and the wind, from the wrong direction today, brought them the smell of hot oil from Benny's Fish and Chips.
Ruth was silent a long time, but she held on to one of her sister's hands, and Hetta, exhausted from the effort of weeping and explaining, made no attempt to draw away. She would have to go indoors soon, and start supper. First she had to pull the fleece back over her exposed cabbages; there was going to be a frost tonight. Soon she had to do it. Not just yet.
Ruth said at last: "Well, they thought for hundreds of years that bumblebees couldn't fly, and the bumblebees went on flying while they argued about it, and then they finally figured it out. It never made any difference to the bumblebees. And I met Melanie's great-uncle once and he was no fool, and Melanie and I are friends because she's not really a space case, it's just that if she pretends to be one, she can tell her uncle's stories. Haven't you ever thought that legends have a lot of truth in them? History is just organised around facts. Facts aren't the whole story or the bumblebees would have had to stop flying till the scientists figured out how they could."
Hetta said wearily, "That's a little too poetical for me. Legends and poetry don't change the fact that I have to go get supper now."