The Beauty of the Wolf. Wray Delaney
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Название: The Beauty of the Wolf
Автор: Wray Delaney
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780008217389
isbn:
And all the pity for himself, for Bess, collides into a single thought: what will become of Randa when she is fully grown? The idea that this beast, this thing he calls child, might have physical desires he can hardly bear to contemplate.
‘I should have left nature to take its course,’ he says into the darkness. ‘I should have let you die.’
In the shadows the sorceress sees a human eye, green as an emerald. She is listening, just as the sorceress is, to every mean, mundane word and thought that this pathetic man has. Near weeping with exhaustion, defeated by all he sees, he recites his charm to calm her. To calm himself.
‘In the name of God be secret and in all your doings be still.’
She will not reply. She has never before answered him.
When she does speak her voice is deep and haunting and he is so stupefied by it that he loses his footing, stumbles backwards, feeling each word of hers as a blow.
‘I am not still,’ she says. ‘I never will be. And whatever your God of retribution might say, I will no longer be secret.’
She screams a scream so piercing it shatters windows, sets dogs to howl. Now the sorceress sees the shape of the beast, she sees the glint of her talons. She hears the flapping of her immense wings. She hears Thomas Finglas cry out in agony. There is a rush of air and the beast is in the snowy garden and the sorceress is in time to see her silhouetted against the night sky, a magnificent winged creature who does not belong to the world of man. The sorceress watches enchanted as the creature tilts her head and inhales the thick, foul breath of the city. She opens her mouth and tastes the snow, stretches her wings to their full extent and swoops out over the river. And she is gone.
‘Randa, come back . . . Randa . . . in all your doings be still . . .’
Thomas’s words collapse in on him. The sorceress lights the candle. He is on his knees in the passage. Blood runs down the torn ribbons of his face, he looks like a martyr and she has little sympathy.
Revenge, she thinks, is the sweetest sweetmeat of all.
‘My hem,’ she says. ‘Give me my hem.’
’Tis my sole plague to be alone,
I am a beast, a monster grown . . .
THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY ROBERT BURTON
In my dreams I am not the beast. I am the child with childish thoughts. I run free on two stout legs, no spiked leather wings to weigh me down. I sing with unformed words that one day will turn into song, a language that will define me. I see my mother smiling, I see my father wake into a nightmare. Who am I, Mother, who am I?
She called me Randa.
She lied. I was no child. I was a malformed, half-wished-for babe. After only three summers I was a thing too strong for chains to bind.
And he, my father, thought me an abomination. I heard his thoughts, caught on the wishbone of his sorrows, tied to his mean regret. I was his greatest triumph and his greatest failure. No word dare he speak of this to her, his love, his beloved, his Bess, my mother.
Soft be she, kind be she, loving be she. She who knew what darkness filled my father’s dreams.
I am old bones wrapped in young skin. I am the beginning and the end without end. I was plunged into mercury vapour and under those metallic waters, in that mirror, I caught a glimpse of time beyond understanding, of a past beyond regret. I knew things no infant should know, wisdom soaked into a deep, an ancient soul.
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