"Michelle West - Winter Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

had heard his terrible cry.
 And she heard it still, although she could seeтАФwith wide eyesтАФthat his lips were
still. But his eyes were wider than eyes should be, and they stared ahead, to her,
sightless, as if he had gone blind.
:Kayla! Be careful!:
Darius' voice.
She realized then what was so wrong, so cutting, about this man's cry of terror: it
reached her the same way that Darius' words did, in a silence that spoke of
knowledge and intimacy. Without thought, she bent to the man huddled against the
floor, and without thought, she tried to lift him.
Realized that lifting him would strain the muscles she had built in the hold, lifting
even the largest of the children; he was not a small man.
And she was a small woman. But determination had always counted for
something. Always.
She caught him in her arms. Caught his face in her hands as his head sought the
cradle of arms and breasts.
His screaming was terrible.
But hers was louder, longer, as insistent as his own.
Look at me!
He whimpered, but the sound was a real sound, a thing of throat and breath and
lips. His eyes, glassy, brown, deep, shifted and jerked, upward now, seeking her
face.
"The darkness," he whispered. "The darkness. The emptiness. I've lost them. I've
failed them all." For a large man, his voice was small, tiny. She should have been
terrified, then.
But as he spoke, she felt what he felt, and she knew, knew, that she had passed
through it herself.

Her own children were gone.
And she was young enough that the visiting merchants never realized that she
had had a husbandтАФgone, tooтАФand a family; that she had had everything she had
desired in her youth.
And what was the point of that desire, but pain? In the end, what was the point?
Her children had not disappeared in the mining accidents that killed the men, when
the men did die; they had not gone missing in the terrible snows that could strand a
person feet away from the doors of the hold, and bury them there, as a taunt, a
winter cruelty.
No. She had held them.
She had held them, just as she had held this man, in this dark, cramped room, in
this empty place that had no words of comfort to offer her.
 The cabin in which she had lived was hallowed by the terrible silence of their
absence; she might walk from room to roomтАФfor there were only threeтАФand
listen furtively to catch their ghostly voices. This was the way she evoked memory,
and memory, in this dark place, this gloom of log and burning wood and little
lightтАФfor light let in coldтАФwas unkind. It led her into darkness.
And that darkness might have devoured her, if her mother had not held her, held
on to her, filled the emptiness with her words and the blessed sound of her voice.
Mother's pain, always.
She spoke to this stranger.
She spoke to this man who understood, who was somehowтАФat this instantтАФa