"Melanie Rawn - Salve Regina" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rawn Melanie)

Wine and Wafer one last time. The living begged God the Father and
Christ the Son to save them, have pity, reveal to them their sins so that
they might mend their ways so the horror would cease.

The horror continued.

Worse than cold and hunger, worse even than her husband's death, her
children did not know her. Their small bodies burned with Hell's own fires
(and why, for surely such little ones had no sins upon their sweet young
souls). Her own body was numb, and her heart and mind as well, the
endless horror burning away all that she was.

Only last summer she had been plump and pretty, her husband the
envy of the village for her pink cheeks and sunlight hair and bright
laughter. Only last summer she had quickened with her sixth child that
this winter had been born too soon and lived too briefly even to be
baptized. Now she was gaunt and hollow, gray and empty. There would be
no more children, and the five that were left her would soon be no more if
she could not give them fresh water and nourishing food and certain cure
for the fever.
 She knew no medicine. There was no food. The water in the village well
was fouled, and she dared not use it even to soothe the heat from her
children's skin, for who knew but that it did not soak fever demons into
their bodies? But water there must beтАФsomewhere, somewhere, clean and
pure. Water obsessed her. She remembered its coolness that slaked thirst
and washed small hands and faces clean for Sunday Mass. She
remembered how her children waved pink fists when Holy Water
drenched their brows and consecrated them to Christ (but for that last
baby, born too soon, whose soul would forever wanderтАФand why, for
surely there could be no sin on a newborn child).

She had no medicine and no foodтАФbut surely somewhere, somewhere,
there must be water.

She bade her husband's sister, whose husband the cobbler was dead, to
come sit with the children while she was gone, for the promise of sweet
water to drink when she returned. She took up her cloak and two wooden
buckets with fraying rope handles, and walked. Past the village well, past
the Church, past the graveyard, past the dying apple orchard and the
unplowed fields. She felt her cold numb bones come back to aching life,
but when her heart and her mind threatened to awaken like her body, she
said the word water over and over and over again, a talisman like a Holy
Relic against fear and thought and pain.

Water, water, water.

And then, deep in the forest, she could smell it. Not trapped in stone,
like the water in the village well, or plate-smooth like the water in the font,
but wild and free and swift-running over rock and moss.