"Laura Resnick Yasmine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Laura)

she touched it how much blood had been washed away to make it glow again. Her
terror was a mystery to me when I appeared before her, for I had taken the shape of
her sweetest dreams; I came to her as a warrior, full of golden beauty and boundless
strength, cloaked in heavy silk that whispered across my skin, and carrying a jeweled
dagger that glittered in the sunlight.
Her screams assailed my ears, and the sensation brought me pain and confusion.
I was seized by others of my size, and the dagger was taken roughly from me. Many
spoke to me, and their questions were strange and baffling. I longed only to be with
the woman, she of the dark hair and pale hands, for it was she I had come to serve;
but I was taken away from her and placed behind iron bars which would not submit
even to such strength as I possessed in that form.
There were more questions, and my answers brought violence upon me,
something I had only ever known in the whirling agony of a dying star. Pain was
entirely new to me, and, in the years they kept me locked in that place, where they
burned the flesh I had moulded out of the air and mutilated the golden beauty I had
drawn from a woman's mind, I learned why men sometimes long to die.
My captors grew old, and others took their place. Finally, at the urging of the
woman herself, who had become wrinkled, gray, and stooped, and who still looked
at me with fear and loathing, they burned me alive to be rid of me at last. But, with
my task still undone, I could not return to the lantern, and so I hovered around the
woman, unseen and unknown, to grant her three wishes. It did not happen quickly,
for she was immensely old and longed for very little at the sunset of her life. I
granted her a good night's sleep, the pretty white hands of her youth -- which sent
her screaming into the night -- and, finally, a quick, easy death.
And one there was who was reluctant to make his wishes known to me. He
feared that, once it was done, he would too late realize that he had asked for all the
wrong things. He was a man of great ambition but few accomplishments, a man of
ponderous thought, quiet habits, and little courage.
I came to him as a servant boy, for of all possible companions, he most desired
one of inferior physical, social, and intellectual stature. By then I understood the
passage of years, the cruel assault of age upon mortal bodies, and the emptying of
the mind which comes to many at the end of their days. I was with him for four
decades, always a changeless boy, even as he grew old in the manner of his kind. He
was never harsh or cruel, and the body I had shaped knew no pain in his service.
When death came for him at last, creeping slowly across his flesh over the span of
many months, I cared for him ceaselessly, tending to his every need. Yet on the day
he died, still having failed to make his three wishes, I was nothing but a servant in the
fading light of his eyes.
And so I wandered, uncertain and incomplete, for I had accomplished nothing
with this man, despite having stayed by his side all of his life. I was utterly alone, as
much a prisoner of that body as I had been a prisoner of the lantern. The rulers of
earth, wind, fire, and water had cast me out of their realm forever, and yet I could
not be part of the realm through which I now wandered. If only they had cast me
upon the wind with my mother, who was punished, too, for my transgression. I
longed for the oblivion they had granted her. I longed to die as men die. I longed for
an end to my imprisonment, whatever that end might be.
In time, on narrow, calloused feet, I followed the lantern across the desert,
destined to serve whosoever held it with a heart full of desire. The desert turned to
mountains, and I trod barefoot through ice and snow, clothed only in rags,
impervious to mortal danger but knowing the pain and cold that any boy would