Nancy Kress - Words Like Pale Stones

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 67.85KB 12 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Words Like Pale Stones

Nancy Kress

THE GREENWOOD GREW LESS GREEN AS WE TRAVELED west.

Grasses lay flatter against the earth. Brush became skimpy. Trees withered, their bare

branches like crippled arms against the sky. There were no flowers. My stolen horse,

double-laden but both of us so light that the animal hardly noticed, picked his way

more easily through the thinning forest. Once his hooves hit some half-buried stone

and sparks struck, strange pale fire slow to die away, the light wavering over the

ground as if alive. I shuddered and looked away.

But the baby watched the sparks intently, his fretful body for once still in the

saddle. I could feel his sturdy little back pressed against me. He was silent, although

he now has a score of words, "go" and "gimme" and "mine!" that ordinarily he uses

all day long. I couldn't see his face, but I knew how his eyes would look: wide and

blue and demanding, beautiful eyes under thick black lashes. His father's eyes,

recognizing his great-great-grandfather's country.

It is terrible for a mother to know she is afraid of her infant son.

I could have stabbed the prince with the spindle from the spinning wheel. Not as

sharp as a needle, perhaps, but it would have done. Once I had used just such a

spindle on Jack Starling, the miller's son, who thought he could make free with me,

the daughter of a village drunkard and a washerwoman whose boasting lies were as

much a joke as her husband's nightly stagger. I have the old blood in me. My father

was a lord! My grandmother could fly to the moon! And, finally, My daughter

Ludie is such a good spinster she can spin straw into gold!

"Go ahead and spin me," Jack leered when he caught me alone in our hovel. His

hands were hot and his breath foul. When he pushed both against my breasts, I

stabbed him with the spindle, square in the belly, and he doubled over like scythed

hay. The spindle revolved in a stone whorl; I bashed him over the head with that and

he went down, crashing into the milk pail with a racket like the end of the world. His

head wore a bloody patch, soft as pulp, for a month.

But there was no stone whorl, no milk bucket, no foul breath in the palace. Even

the spinning was different. "See," he said to me, elegant in his velvets and silks, his

clean teeth gleaming, and the beautiful blue eyes bright with avarice, "it's a spinning

wheel. Have you ever seen one before?"

"No," I said, my voice sounding high and squeaky, not at all my own. Straw

covered the floor, rose to the ceiling in bales, choked the air with chaff.

"They're new," he said. "From the east." He lounged against the door, and no

straw clung to his doublet or knee breeches, slick with embroidery and jewels. "They

spin much faster than the hand-held distaff and spindle."

"My spindle rested in a whorl. Not in my hand," I said, and somehow the words

gave me courage. I looked at him straight, prince or no prince. "But, my lord, I'm

afraid you've been misled. My mother… says things sometimes. I cannot spin straw

into gold. No mortal could."

He only smiled, for of course he was not mortal. Not completely. The old blood

ran somewhere in his veins, mixed but there. Fevered and tainted, some said. Only

the glimmerings of magic were there, and glimmerings without mastery were what

made the cruelty. So I had heard all my life, but I never believed it—people will, after

all, say anything—until I stood with him in that windowless room, watching his smile

as he lounged against the door, chaff rising like dusty gold around me.

"I think you are completely capable of spinning straw into gold," he said. "In fact,

I expect you to have spun all the straw in this room into gold by morning."

"Then you expect the moon to wipe your ass!" I said, and immediately clapped

my hand over my mouth. Always, always my mouth brings me trouble. But he only

went on smiling, and it was then, for the first time, that I was afraid. Of that bright,

blue-eyed smile.

"If you don't spin it all into gold," he said silkily, "I will have you killed. But if you

do, I will marry you. There—that's a sweet inducement, is it not? A prince for a

husband for a girl like you. And for me—a wife with a dowry of endless golden

fingers."

I saw then, as if in a vision, his fingers endlessly on me, and at the expression on

my face his smile broadened.

"A slow death," he said, "and a painful one. But that won't happen, will it, my

magical spinster? You won't let it happen?"

"I cannot spin straw into gold!" I shouted, in a perfect frenzy of loathing and fear,

but he never heard me. A rat crept out from behind the bales and started across the

floor. The prince's face went ashen. In a moment he was gone, whirling through the

door and slamming it behind him before the rat could reach him. I heard the heavy

iron bar drop into its latch on the other side, and I turned to look at the foreign

spinning wheel, backed by bales to the rough beams of the ceiling.

My knees gave way and I sank down upon the straw.

There are so many slow and painful ways to die.

I don't know how long I shrank there, like some mewling and whimpering babe,

visioning horrors no babe ever thought of. But when I came back to myself, the rat

was still nosing at the door, trying to squeeze underneath. It should have fit; not even

our village rats are so thin and mangy. On hands and knees, I scuttled to join the rat.

Side by side we poked at the bottom of the door, the sides, the hinges.

It was all fast and tight. Not even a flea could have escaped.

Next I wormed behind the bales of straw, feeling every inch of the walls. They

were stone, and there were no chinks, no spaces made rotten by damp or moss.

This angered me. Why should the palace be the only sound stone dwelling in the

entire damp-eaten village? Even Jack Starling's father's mill had weak stones, damn

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Nancy Kress - Words Like Pale Stones.pdf

共12页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Nancy Kress - Words Like Pale Stones

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: