Black Heart, Ivory Bones - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Ellen Datlow (The Crone DELIA SHERMAN) #6

The Crone DELIA SHERMAN

Delia Sherman is the author of numerous short stories, and of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove (which won the Mythopoeic Award), and The Freedom Maze. She is the co-author of “The Fall of the Kings” in Bending the Landscape (nominated for a World Fantasy Award) with fellow fantasist and partner Ellen Kushner, and co-editor of The Horns of Elfland: An Anthology of Music and Magic. Sherman is also co-editor, with Terri Windling, of The Essential Bordertown. She is a contributing editor for Tor Books and a member of the Tiptree Awards Motherboard.

* * *

I sit by the side of the road, comfortably planted

On a stone my buttocks have worn silky.

My garments are a peeling bark of rags,

My feet humped as roots, my hands catch

Like twigs, my hair is moss and feathers.

My eyes are a bird’s eyes, bright and sharp.

I wait for sons.

They always come, sometimes twice a day

In questing season, looking for adventure,

Fortune, fame, a magic flower, love.

Only the youngest sons will find it:

The others might as well have stopped at home

For all the good I’ll do them.

It’s the second sons who break my heart,

Anxious at their elder brothers’ failure,

Stuck with the second-best horse, the second-best sword,

The second-best road to disaster. Often I wish

A second son would share his bread with me,

Wrap his cloak around my body, earn

The princess and the gold.

That’s one wish. The second (I’m allowed three)

Is that a daughter, any daughter at all—

Youngest, oldest — seeking her fortune,

A kingdom to rule, a life to call her own

Would sit and talk with me, give me her bread

And her ear. Perhaps (third wish) she’d ask

After my kin, my home, my history.

Ah then, I’d throw off my rags and dance in the road

Young as I never was, and free.

* * *

The old crone is a familiar fairy tale figure found in stories around the world. In “quest” and “boy-in-search-of-fortune” fairy tales, the hero encounters an old woman on the road and must treat her with courtesy or suffer the consequences. In courtly French fairy tales she is usually a beautiful fairy in disguise, but in German and French peasant folk lore, the crone sits mysteriously at the edges of the story, encouraging children to be kind to poverty-stricken old ladies.