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

And as she did, she passed a small cot and stopped before it, frozen.
It held a young child, eyes wide, hair damp against his forehead. Were it not for
the slack emptiness of his features, he would have been beautiful. She forgot
Darius; forgot his words.
She listened with her heart.
And her heart shuddered, and nearly broke, from the weight of what it heard. She
had once been near the mines when a shaft had collapsed. The roar of falling rock
had deafened her; the shouts of fear, of terror, the commands for action, had done
the same. And through it all, one guilty thought had kept her still: she should not
have come here. Children were not allowed by the mines. But she had wanted to
see her father.
Standing in this room, at the foot of this anonymous cot, she felt the same
deafness and the same guilt. Some part of her urged her to turn, to run, but she
ignored it because she had heard it for most of her adult life.
What loss could she suffer that she had not suffered?
She took a step, and then another, pushing her way forward as if through a gale,
until she stood by the child's side. And then she reached for him.
He was not large; she did not know if he had once been chubby, as children his
age often were; he was not that now; he weighed almost nothing. She lifted him, as
she had lifted one other sick child, almost two years ago.
He was screaming now, in the silence behind her silence, and she joined him
because it was the only way she knew to answer the memories that even now
threatened to break her.
Her son.
Mommmmmmmeeeeeee
Her child.
MOMMMMMEEEEEE
Her own son had not wept or cried or struggled. The fever had spared him terror,
and he understood, in the height of its grip, that she held him in the safety of her
arms.
Almost unconsciously, she shifted her grip on this stranger until it was the same
embrace; her shoulders were curved forward, her spine rounded at the top, as if,
hunched over him, she might hide from the death that was waiting, waiting, in the
winter's depths. She placed her lips against his forehead, and tasted salt.
She was crying.
He was screaming, but she knew how to comfort terror by now. Her arms
tightened and she began to rock him, gently, back and forth, whispering his name,
her son's name, as if they were the same.
It happened suddenly: His arms jerked and trembled as he tried to lift them. She
did not know how long he had lain in that cot, inactive, but his hands were so weak
they were like butterfly wings against her neck.
"The dragon," he whispered, his voice a rasp, a creak. "The dragon will eat us."
"No," she told him firmly. "The dragon can't land. He can only fly, making night
wherever he goes. He can roar. He can scream. But he can't land."
"He hates us."
"Aye," she replied. She had never lied to her children; she felt no need to lie to
this one. "He hates all living things. All happy things." And as she said those
words, she felt the truth of them, although she had never thought to speak them
before. The boy's hands touched her cheeks. "You were scared," he whispered.
 "No."