"Melanie Rawn - The Sacrifice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rawn Melanie)

She was speaking again, proud and defiant. ''My Voices did come from God, and
everything I have done was by God's order!"
"Silence her!" Cauchon hissed.
It was then that he realized he did not hear the bishop the way he had heard the girl. He
had seen the man's lips move, and knew what words he spoke. But he truly heard only Joan
Or perhaps God, speaking in Joan's voice.
He stared at the small plain face, the short sturdy frame, the hair shaved now where it h
been worn in a man's style just above her ears, and to him she appeared well-nigh sexless.
Male by appearance and clothing, male in warlike habitтАФbut also female, assuming the gui
and greatness of a warrior over the small soft breasts and gently curved hips of a woman. S
ought to have borne babies, not arms. But even though he knew her to be female, still with h
man's clothes and her unflinching gaze as the pyre was lit, she was to him neither woman no
man.
 But certainly more of a man than that puling fool she had seen crowned King of France
You do not deserve her, Charles, he thought. And you will not have her, not as you an
she intended. There will be no blood to seep into French soil. There will be no Sacrifice.
He could hear again, but only the hiss and crackle of the flames. She was still staring a
him. Nearby, Cauchon leaned eagerly forward, avid as a scavenging crow for carrion. Whi
smoke began to rise, obscuring her from view. He heard her cry out to God.
Smoke draped the roof and walls of the church like white wedding garments. But the sm
of the marriage feast was the stink of her own scorched flesh.
At length, she was nothing but ash. He left the platform with his fellow priests, wonder
if any of them would heed her final request and say a mass for her soul.
As he walked from the square, he heard them. The voices.
"Did you see it? In the flamesтАФ"
"Writ with fire!"
"The name of Jesus, right above her headтАФ"
"And the dove, did you see the dove fly from the pyre?"
"A saint, they have murdered a saintтАФ"
He steeled his jaw and strode away.

H e was writing to his daughter, inquiring about the health of his grandson and namesa
when Bedford burst into his apartments.
"You haven't heard?" demanded the duke. "That stupid, stupid man! He ruined everythi
We'll never be rid of her now!"
"Calm yourself, nephew," he said. This man was his least-favorite relation but for that
colossal moron, Gloucester. Bedford invariably ground his teeth when reminded of their
kinshipтАФbut never dared insult him to his face. Not the Cardinal of England. "I recognize t
'her' of this, for we have been solely concerned with the wretched girl for a very long time.
who is the 'he'?"
"The executioner, that's who!" Bedford flung himself onto the crimson cushions paddin
window embrasure, but was just as quickly up again and pacing. "He tried and tried, but he
couldn't burn either her heart or her guts! So do you know what he did with them? Threw th
into the Seine, that's what!"
Leaning back in his chair, he rested his gaze on his daughter's nameтАФrendered in the
French spelling, in his precise cleric's hand, on the finest parchment. Jehanne. But it was n
his daughter's sweet face he saw, a face so like his long-dead mother's that sometimes his h
caught in his throat on seeing her smile. It was the earnest, unlovely face of a different Jeha
that rose up before him.
Her heart bled into the Seine, the great Mother of Waters that bleeds into the soil.