The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
But although Zeus was both boastful and unpredictable, he could also be generous, and it was with this hope in her heart that Poseidon’s daughter swam for the second time to the white rock of Kastro to throw herself upon her uncle’s magnanimity and beg from him the trick of dream-conjuring.
Under the lemon trees Zeus opened his eyes; beside him the lovely German girl stirred in her sleeping-bag, and her lovely mouth murmured the name ‘Stavros’. Zeus stroked the silky pelt on his chest and was well pleased with the night’s work. When he saw the rough head of his ragamuffin niece break the surface of the bay he laughed indulgently.
‘What now?’ he cried, throwing a handful of figs at her. For a daughter of the meek and myopic Poseidon she was certainly demanding.
Affecting not to notice the sleeping girl, Poseidon’s daughter drew herself up and made her request with as much dignity as she could muster.
‘Stop wanting, start having,’ said Zeus, flicking the silver scissors casually up into the air, where they hung suspended. Poseidon’s daughter leapt like a porpoise to catch them, but not until she had made a solemn promise to return them after seven nights did the scissors fall into her eager hand.
And so every night for seven nights Poseidon’s daughter waited and watched by the jetty, and each time the foreign woman flickered into Hanni’s dreams she took the silver scissors and cut her out completely. And Hanni snorted with distress in his sleep, and in the mornings was fretful and clumsy, like a woman at her monthly time, and took to sitting crouched under the tamarisk trees, surly and unspeaking. But if the beauties who had clustered around him so admiringly were disgruntled and drifted off in search of more responseful men, so too was Poseidon’s daughter farther from her goal than ever. For although she could cut the Nordic woman out of Hanni’s dreams and scatter her images as far as Africa, try as she might she could find no way of filling the gaps that the woman’s face had left. For her own dream was not clear enough, was boundaryless and wavered, and would not be fitted in.
From her rock promontory Athena saw her niece swim asymmetrical and distraught towards the high rock of Kastro, saw also the dangerous flash of the silver scissors in the light of the setting sun; and from her erratic path in the sea Poseidon’s daughter saw the clean-cut limbs of her aunt Athena, who knew how to develop herself. Athena set down her weighing-scales and stopped bargaining with the fishermen, and called her niece to her. But as she listened to the girl’s unhappy tale, and as she stroked the stormy curls on the unhappy head, all the time her eyes rested with longing on the silver scissors, and despite itself her mind filled with plans to steal them from Zeus, although—or so she persuaded herself—her only desire in so doing would be to put an end to his ungodly nonsense. In her mind s eye all Attica lay before her, just and fair as her own daughter-city of Athens, and the vision glittered as her voice spoke comfort and resolution to Poseidon’s daughter. She spoke of the power of the will, and how it must be tended like the melon seed in its earthy bed or the speckled egg in the belly of the heron, and she waxed long and lyrical in this vein until she had quite forgotten her less honourable intentions.
Finally, remembering herself, she said, ‘But you are young yet and only learning. So I will pit the power of my own will behind yours and, believe me, we will send Hanni the dream that he deserves. Only you must give the silver scissors to me now, for safe-keeping.’
At first Poseidon’s daughter demurred, saying that she had made her uncle a solemn promise, but the fireflies winking at her from the juniper bushes said that indeed she was young and weren’t promises for adults to keep, and finally she was persuaded and handed over the silver scissors.
That night Poseidon’s daughter did not go to the jetty but slept soundly in her palace bed, and in her dream her aunt Athena was a wise and whiskered fish which plied peacefully in and out of the windows.
Athena, meanwhile, took up her knapsack and hiked through the spinifex under the whitest of moons until she looked down upon the silvered rock of Kastro and the sleeping form of Zeus. Zeus lay outstretched on a marble boulder, his arms flung above his head like a child who has never known fear. Under cover of a cloud which shadowed the moon. Athena crept up on the sleeping figure and knelt beside him. She gazed at his right hand, at the soft palm upturned, at the squat thumb, and lastly at the elongated pointing forefinger, the finger of pride, the finger which stabbed out such arbitrary commands. Then, full of resolve to separate the finger from its knuckle and the god from his pride, she took the silver scissors from her knapsack.
But before the blade encountered the golden skin, Zeus, without opening an eye, let out a great snort of triumph and seized Athena’s wrist, so that her ambitions were quite confounded.
Athena, however, was above all a states woman, and possessed at all times an understanding of the political weaknesses of her opponents; understood, for instance, that Zeus could ill afford to see the citizens of Athens roused against him.
And so she folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head with all appearance of meekness while Zeus paced the lemon grove till the red dust rose, and in his heart wrath struggled with expediency.
But what of Poseidon's daughter, then, with the night over and the butterfly-blue morning just beginning, the morning when Athena would pit wits and will behind her quest for Hanni? She stretched out her limbs in her cockle-shell bed, imagining how Hanni too would be waking now, stretching his lissom brown form, rubbing sleep from eyes slaty-green as a lizard’s back; in luxurious superstition she mimicked every move he might make, down to the tiniest moue of the mouth and the most exquisite twitch of the toe.
When the conch shell sounded at the palace gate Poseidon’s daughter could hardly contain her excitement. However, it was not her aunt Athena who was ushered in but—with much pomp and ceremony and pawing of horses—her eminent uncle Zeus. Zeus waved aside the deferences that were due to him and fixed a ferocious eye on his unruly niece, who, seeing the silver scissors safe once again in his belt, threw herself at his feet and was much afraid.