"Yolen-TheLadysGarden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

JANE YOLEN

THE LADY'S GARDEN

IN THE LADY'S GARDEN lived three unicorns. They were all old -- Lady, garden,
and unicorns -- having been there from the beginning of things. The garden was
kept from the sight of the World by a very large stone wall which was overgrown
with spindly weeds and thistles, and hairy moss plugging up the chinks.

When the sun shone down, the unicorns liked to lie under the apple tree, which
was the oldest thing of all in the garden. Its branches hung down to the ground,
gnarled and misshapen, but covered with the most delicious red apples the year
round.

When it rained, which was an hour every other day and twice on Tuesdays, regular
as clockwork, the unicorns would stay in the stone barn, snugged together in the
sweet-smelling hay. The patter on the barn roof then took on a soporific rhythm,
and often the unicorns would doze and dream. Their dreams were always about
running over great green swards, the wind through the white manes. Always.

If the Lady dreamed -- or even she napped -- no one knew for sure, for she only
spoke of waking things: tide and sun and wind and rain and the changing of
seasons.

On one side of the garden was, as I have said, the World. On the other was the
Great Ocean. It was the Ocean's tide which was often the subject of the Lady's
discourse. And though she may have thought any trouble to the garden would come
to it from the World's side, it was the Ocean that did, in the end, bring about
her direst time.

Now, though the unicorns were all terribly old, they were not the same age. The
oldest was Wishart, whose skin was almost translucent; it was a kind of pearly
white, like the inside of certain shells. When he walked -- and he never ran --
he moved with an ancient grace. His breath studied musty, like a bowl of crushed
flower petals. He rarely listened to anything but the sound of the Ocean outside
the wall.

The second oldest was Tartary. Her skin was like vellum and looked brittle but
wasn't. In fact it was as soft as an infant's and smelled that sweet. sour
infant smell, as if talc and sour milk had been mixed together. Tartary listened
only to the Lady's voice.

The third oldest -- they called her Infants when they called her anything at all
-- still had a bit of spirit to her walk, and a bit of flint in her amber eyes.
Even her horn was still the gold of new-minted coins, while the other unicorns
had horns more like the color of the full moon.

If Wishart listened only to the sound of the Ocean, and Tartary listened only to