"Jane Yolen - The White Babe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

would bruise herself again and again to no avail.


She said then what she thought right. тАЬThe mountain tribes will take her and love her as you cannot.
They are known for their mothering. And I swear they will bring her to a stranger destiny than her tiny
gripping hand and her early sight have already foretold.тАЭ
If he remarked her words, the man did not respond, his shoulders already set in the grief he would
carry with him to his own grave, and thatтАФthough he knew it notтАФsoon enough, for as they said often
enough in Slipskin, The heart is not a knee that can bend.
So the midwife took the child and left. She paused only long enough to cry out the village diggers and
two women to bathe and shroud the corpse before it set badly in the rigor of death. She told them of the
childтАЩs miraculous birth, the wonder of it still imprinted on her face.
Because she was known to be a stubborn woman with a mind set in a single directionтАФlike a needle
in water pointing northтАФnone of them gainsayed her going to the mountain clans. They did not know she
was more frightened than even she herself knew, frightened of both the child and the trip. One part of her
hoped the villagers would stop her. But the other part, the stubborn part, would have gone whatever they
said and perhaps they guessed it and saved their breath for telling her story afterwards. For as it was said
in Slipskin, Telling a tale is better than living it.
And so the midwife turned toward the mountains where she had never been before, trusting Great
AltaтАЩs guardians to track her before she was gone too far and clutching the child to her breast like an
amulet.


It was luck that an early spring melt had cleared most of the paths to the mountain foot or the midwife
would never have gotten even that far. She was a woman of the towns, her duties bringing her from
house to house like a scavenger. She knew nothing of the forest perils or the great tan-colored cats that
roamed the rockslides. With the babe swaddled and wrapped to her breast, she had started out bravely
enough and managed surprisingly well, getting to the mountain foot without a scratch or slip. Many a
strong hunting man had not done as well that year. And perhaps it was true, as the villagers said, that
Fish are not the best authority on water.
She sheltered the first night among the twisted roots of a blasted tree, giving the child suck from a milk
crock with a linen teat dipped in. Herself, she ate cheese and brown bread and stayed warm with half a
skin of sweet wine she carried. She ate unsparingly for she thought she had but a single overnight to go
before she reached the holds of the mountain clans. And she was sure the women of the
mountainsтАФwhom she had long desired to visit, that longing compounded of envy and fearтАФwould give
her plenty of food and drink and gold to sustain her when they saw what it was she carried to them. She
was a townswoman in her thinking, always trade for trade. She did not understand the mountains or the
people who lived there; she did not know that they would feed her independent of all else but her need
and that they had little use for gold so never kept it.
The second day was bright and pearly. Clouds lined only the horizon. She chose to walk along the
bank of a swift-flowing stream because it seemed easier than breaking a new trail. If she had noticed the
scat and could have read it, she would have known this was a favorite run of mountain cats, for trout
were plentiful in the stream, and foolish, especially in the evening in the presence of bugs. But she was a
woman of the town and she could read print only, a minor learning, and so she never heard the cat on her
trail nor noticed its scratchy warnings on the trees.
That second night she stashed the babe in a high crotch of a tree, believing it quite safe there, and
walked down to the stream to bathe in the moonlight. Being a townswoman and a midwife she valued
cleanliness above all other things.
It was while she was bent over, dipping her hair in the cold water of the stream and muttering aloud
about how long the trip was taking, that the cat struck. Swiftly, silently, surely. She never felt more than a