"Joel Rosenberg - Hidden Ways 3" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenberg Joel C)

Winter was coming.

She could smell the frost in the air, mingled with the tang of ozone. The cold, wet wind rattled the few remaining brown leaves
that still clung in dead desperation to the branches of the old oak. The lightning flashed, and the thunder boomed not far away
upwind, high on the eastern ridge where the road to the Dominions twisted like a silver thread through the gray and the green.

The cold didn't bother her, even though all she wore was a knee-length shift, belted tightly to accentuate her slim waist and the full
breasts and. hips that were only sometimes in style, but always popular with men down through the ages.

At this altitude, soon there would be snow, even this far south, but that wouldn't be more than a mild inconvenienceтАФfor her, at
leastтАФif she decided to make the climb to forage again.

Lighting flashed and thunder boomed, yet again.

The lightning and thunder didn't bother her, either; in fact, they amused her.

Boys will be boys, after all.

A human eye wouldn't have caught it, but the lightning didn't flow down from the dark clouds overhead; instead, it splattered
outward and up from a single point of impact in the mountains, white-hot sparks fountaining up and out from a blacksmith's strike
against his anvil.

The woman the locals called Frida the Ferryman's Wife grinned to herself as she stooped to part the soft moss at the base of the
old oak tree, and reached her hand through the musty humus into the tight-packed, chalky soil, her fingers probing carefully,
gently, tenderly. They emerged filthy, the dirt packed hard into the creases of her knuckles and even under her short nails, but
cupping yet another truffle the size and shape of a baby's fist: brown like old wood, veined in black and white, covered in coarse
polygonal warts, each with a tiny depression at its summit.

They were rarer here in the south, but they often had rings of brown mushrooms up in the Dominions. A drifting spore, too small
for human eyes to see, would fall to the ground and find just the right combination of dank and dark to grow and send out shoots;
and from those shoots would grow brown-capped mushrooms, in a ring perhaps two, three, four paces across.

Overnight, in a meadow, perhaps, or even on the green, green grasses of the Cities, a perfect circle of mushrooms would appear,
as if by magic.

Fairy rings, the children called them, and they would shy away. There was something chilling in their sudden appearance, in their
unnatural regularity.

Some fairy ring mushrooms were quite tasty, others, often similar in color and shape, were quite deadly. Perhaps an apothecary
would be summoned to identify them as wholesome, taking a share as his pay and a bite as his proof. Or perhaps not.

But, as with all things, the center would die. Still, the shoots would live, each to send out its own shoots, to form rings of rings,
and then rings of rings of rings until, finally, the circle was too large and subtle to be detected by ephemerals, who could no more
detect the shape of an ancient fairy circle than they could watch a high, jagged mountain range slowly crumble, writhe, and wither
into shrunken old age, like a snake with a broken back.

It was all a matter of perspective and patience. These were useful attributes even for an ephemeral, and it was difficult to get
through even one's first few centuries without developing both.

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