Читать онлайн «The Ropemaker»
Автор Питер Дикинсон
Table of Contents
Asarta
1 - The Forest
2 - The Story
3 - The Gathering
Faheel
4 - The River
5 - The Camp
6 - Ellion’s House
7 - The Pirrim Hills
8 - The Walls of the City
9 - The Grand Trunk Road
10 - The City of Death
11 - The Island
12 - The Palace
13 - The Common Way
Ramdatta
14 - A Bunch of Grapes
15 - The Road North
16 - Lord Kzuva’s Tower
17 - The Forest Edge
18 - Roc Feathers
19 - The Lake
20 - Home
The Cost of Living
For Robin
Go then, adventurer, on your vivid journey,
Though once again, of course, I cannot join you—
That is as certain as your happy ending.
The one-armed captain in the pirate harbor
Would know me in an instant for a Jonah.
No gnome would ever speak with me for witness,
And so let slip the spell-dissolving answer
Before you’d even heard the sacred riddle.
I, as it happens, know it from my reading,
But the blind queen would ask it in a language
Not in the syllabus of my old college,
But which your loved, illiterate nanny taught you.
No, I will stay at home and keep things going,
Conduct the altercation with the builders,
Hoe the allotment, fix the carburetor.
I’m genuinely happier with such dealings;
It isn’t merely that they pass the seasons
Until I hear your footstep on the threshold.
Then I will sit and listen to your story
With a complacently benign amazement,
Believing it because it’s you that tell it.
And when you’ve done, and I have asked my questions,
I for the umpteenth time on such homecomings
Will say what’s happened to the cost of living.
Asarta
1
The Forest
It had snowed in the night. Tilja knew this before she woke, and waking she remembered how she knew. Some-where between dream and dream a hand had shaken her shoulder and she’d heard Ma’s whisper.
“It’s snowing at last. I must go and sing to the cedars. You’ll have to make the breakfast before you feed the hens.
”Tilja reached up to the shelf beyond the bolster and pulled her folded underclothes in under the quilt, where she spread them along beside her body to warm through. While they did so she lay and listened to the wind hooting in the chimney above her. Anja, beside her, grumbled in her sleep, clutching at her share of the quilt while Tilja wriggled out of her nightshirt and into the underclothes. Then she slid out and hurried into another layer of clothing, tucked Anja snugly in and finished dressing.
The bed was a boxlike structure set right into the immense old fireplace, on one side of the stove. Her parents slept in a larger box on the far side, but that would be empty by now, with Da in the byre seeing to the animals, and Ma on her way to the cedar lake, far into the forest.
Faint light seeped through the shutters, but she didn’t open them, and not just because of the savage wind that was battering against them and shrieking into their cracks. She liked to do these first tasks in the dark, knowing without having to feel around exactly where to put her hand for anything she needed. Woodbourne was her home, and this kitchen was the heart of it, as familiar to her as her own body. She had no more need to see to find things than she had to put her finger to the tip of her nose. Relighting the stove in the dark was a way of starting the day by telling herself that this was so.
