"Judith Tarr - The Isle of Glass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tarr Judith)

to conjure in." He sat stiffly and sighed. "My bones feel it. You know,
Alf-suddenly I'm old."
There was a silence. Brother Alfred gazed into the fire, seeing a pair of
young novices, one small and slight and red as a fox, the other tall and
slender and very pale with hair like silver-gilt. They were very industriously
stealing apples from the orchard. His lips twitched. "What are you thinking
of?* asked the Abbot. "Apple-stealing."
"Is that all? I was thinking of the time we changed the labels on every
bottle, jar, and box of medicine in the infirmary. We almost killed old
Brother Ansetm when he took one of Brother Herbal's clandestine aphrodisiacs
instead of the medicine he needed for his indigestion."
Brother Alfred laughed. "I remember that very well indeed; after Dom Edwin's
caning, \ couldn't sit for a fortnight. And we had to change the labels back
again. In the end we knew Brother Herbal's stores better than he did himself."
"I can still remember. First shelf: dittany, fennel, tansy, rue. . . . Was it
realty almost sixty years ago?" "Really."
THE ISLE OF GLASS
"Tempusjugtt, with a vengeance." Morwin ran his hands through his hair. A
little red still remained; the rest was rusty white. "I've had my threescore
years and ten, with three more for good measure. Time to think of what I
should have thought of all along if I'd been as good a monk as 1 liked to
think 1 was."
"Good enough, Morwin. Good enough."
"I could have been much better. I could have refused to let them make me
Abbot. You did."
"You know why."
"Foolishness. You could have been a cardinal if you'd cared
to try.71
"How could I have? You know what I am." "1 know what you think you are. You've
had the story of your
advent drummed into your head so often, you've come to believe
it."
"It's the truth. How it was the winter solstice, and a very storm out of Hell.
And in the middle of it, at midnight indeed, a novice, keeping vigil in the
chapel, heard a baby's cry. He had the courage to go out, even into that
storm, which should have out-howled anything living, and he found a prodigy. A
babe of about a season's growth, lying naked in the snow. And yet he was not
cold; even as the novice opened the postern, what had been warming him took
flight. Three white owls. Our brave lad took a long look, snatched up the
child, and bolted for the chapel. When holy water seemed to make no
impression, except what one would expect from a baby plunged headlong into an
ice-cold bath, he baptized his discovery, named him Alt-Alfred for the
Church's sake-and proceeded to make a monk of him. But the novice always swore
that the brat had come out of the hollow hills." "Had he?w
"I don't know. I seem to remember, faint and far, like another's memory: fire
and shouting, and a girl running with a baby in her arms. Then the girl, cold
and dead, and a storm, and three white owls. No one ever found her." Brother
Alfred breathed deep. "Maybe that's only a dream, and someone actually exposed
Judith TOTT
me as a changeling. What better place for one? Here on Ynys Witrin, with all