"Bruce Holland Rogers - The Apple Golem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

The Apple Golem
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1995 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal
use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


Da├Я ist die alte, alte Liebesgeschichte.
***


Baltasar wearied of the affairs of princes. They built their fiefdoms into kingdoms and their kingdoms
into empires. Then they died, and their sons brought everything to dust. New princes arose, and their
wars echoed the wars of their forebears like the notes of a tune heard too often, too often. Such things
happened as they had always happened, and they would go on, Baltasar knew, for a very long time, with
Baltasar there to witch the weather and concoct the poisons and cast the oracles, or without him.
So, he thought, let it be without.
***


He followed the path into the mountains, and went on where there was no path, between the
knife-edged peaks and across the fields of ice. On the other side, in another country, he descended into
forest. There was a place where apple trees grew wild and each year dropped hard and bitter fruit. Here
Baltasar built a hut of stones and lived in silence.
***


How did he live? Did he draw some vital substance from the very air? Did sunlight nourish him?
Perhaps it was simpler than that. He might have set snares. Mushrooms abounded in that black soil. He
might have eaten of the apples.
***


In silence, he lived. In silence, and alone.
***


And finally, it began to gnaw at him, the old, old hunger. It worried at his bones all winter long,
nameless, keeping him from sleep as the snows piled soft and deep.
***


Spring came. Still the hunger was with Baltasar, and still he had no name for it. Then overnight, the
apple blossoms opened all at once. Baltasar, blinking in their morning whiteness, clutched at his cloak. In
their perfume, he recognized and named the hunger. Once named, it gnawed at him all the harder.
***
 With summer, green apples grew heavy on the trees. Baltasar began to pick them, and with a little