"Liz Williams - Wolves of the Sprit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)

WOLVES OF THE SPIRIT
by Liz Williams

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тАЬWhen I sent my first story to AsimovтАЩs, I thought it didnтАЩt have a hope. I literally
could not believe the acceptance letter; it was rather like slipping into a parallel
universe. Things havenтАЩt changed much. Great going to all of you and happy
thirtieth!тАЭтАФLiz Williams

Liz Williams is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in
Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply shop.
In the US, her novels and story collections have been published by Bantam
Spectra and Nightshade Books. Liz appears regularly in Realms of Fantasy,
AsimovтАЩs, and other magazines. In her latest tale, she takes an icy look at
some haunting songs and some ominous...
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I am the keeper of the Baille Atha light now that my mother is dead, a princess
in an ice-colored tower. My kingdom is the last hummock of land before the wastes
of the Western Ocean, the final island before Darkland, and the enemy, and the start
of storms.
Generations of women, generations of lighthouse keepers. ItтАЩs all kept in a
book, a real one, bound with leather and iron as well as being stored in the computer
database of the light. The book isnтАЩt necessary, of course, and neither is it necessary
for a living person to tend a lighthouseтАФtheyтАЩd even stopped it on old Earth, long
before we left for the stars, but something about Muspell, something about the sea
and the mist and the ice, the way that ships vanish between midnight and morning,
the way that you hear a sudden voice on the open ocean, seems to have convinced
my ancestors that you need a living soul in a lighthouse, a small stand against the
dark.
And thereтАЩs a lot of darkness, on Muspell.
My mother hated the winters here, the short bleak days followed by the quick
fall of the sun, and she loved the long light summers, with the Northern Fire playing
greengold above the horizon and the sky flowering with the summer stars. But I am
the opposite, liking the stormy nights and the crash of dark, restless in summer with
the gleaming length of days.
Shoredwellers always ask if you become lonely, out on the ice. They donтАЩt
realize that you are never alone: the weather is always with you, and the sea, and
these are the great presences beyond the smaller spirits, of birds and sealstock and
the selk. And others, too: once I went out onto the field at the end of winter to see an
old woman standing at the very end of the crags, above the sea. She raised a hand
and waved to someone, but when I reached her, she was no longer there.
You would have thought that IтАЩd have dreamed of a man, coming across the
sea to claim me, a young girlтАЩs dreams, but I was content with what I had. There
seemed enough time for that; I would wait, I told myself, until I became lonely, but
somehow I never did.
Then, one day, a man did come.
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This is the way things are done. My own father was an island-man from
Haut-terre, blown off course by the equinoctial gales, his little boat crashing onto the