"Baker,.Scott.-.Ashlu.2.-.1987.-.Drink.the.fire.from.the.flames" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Scott)

"The alchemist, like the smith, and like the potter before him, is a 'master of fire. ' It is with fire that he controls the passage of matter from one siate to another. The first potter who, with the aid of live embers, was successful in hardening those shapes which he had given to his clay, must have felt the intoxication of the demiurge: he had discovered a transmuting agent. That which took natural heat- from the sun or the bowels of the earth-so long to ripen, was transformed by fire at a speed hitherto undreamed of. This demiurgic enthusiasm springs from that obscure presentiment that the great secret lay in discovering how to 'perform' faster than Nature, in other words (since it is always necessary to talk in terms of the spiritual experience of primitive man) how, without peril, to interfere in the processes of the cosmic forces. Fire turned out to be the means by which man could 'execute' faster, but it could also do something other than what already existed in Nature. It was therefore the manifestation of a magico-religious power which could modify the world and which, consequently, did not belong to this world. This is why most primitive cultures look upon the specialist in the sacred-the shaman, the medicine man, the magician-as a 'master of fire. '"
Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible

Chapter One

In those days Ashlu was a land of mountains and deserts. A single great river, the Nacre, flowed from Lake Nal in the Lattan foothills to the Sea of Marshes. Men lived in the foothills and on the fertile plains surrounding them; men swarmed in the Nacre's broad valley and fertile delta; all else was desert of salt and sand, or so the men of Chal believed.
Chal, City of the Eighty-four Sils-the eighty-four priesthoods-was nineteen days by barge or coracle from the plains, but Kyborash, the colony Chal had planted on the ruins of conquered Drea-'Est, was almost on the edge of the plains, and it was to the Fair at Kyborash that the Nomads came to trade horses and rare dyestuffs. It was to Kyborash as well, where the clays, glazes, and woods for charcoals were all far finer than those to be found elsewhere in the Chaldan Empire, that the Ri Sil-the Potters' Sil-had come, forsaking its former home in the city of Chal itself.
Ri Tal was a Master Potter of the Ri Sil. He was a stout, strong, open-faced man with yellow-brown skin and coarse brown hair. As a Master Potter, he would never have left Kyborash had he not married Kuan, the second daughter of Tas No Sil, the High Smith, but by smith law a woman who married outcaste had to spend the first year of her marriage in ritual exile from the city of her birth. A Master Potter had been needed to supervise the Sil's affairs in Chal, and Kuan was beautiful, tall and full-bodied yet supple, with the fire-red hair and black eyes of the smiths; besides, the Sil Smith had offered Ri Tal a truly magnificent brideprice for what was, after all, only the outcaste marriage of a second daughter, so Ri Tal had accepted exile willingly.
In this, Sartor had smiled upon them. Some seven months after their arrival in Chal, Kuan blessed Ri Tal with a son, but the boy's eyes were yellow, and had their child been born anywhere but in Chal itself, the Warriors of the Hand and Voice who had come to record its birth would have taken it from them to be killed. Only the Kings of Chal had yellow eyes, and King Asp made sure that no child bearing the outward signs of royal birth grew to challenge his rule. But the Warrior of the Voice who examined the boy was an old man who had served in the Palace for more than twenty-four years; he had known Asp's father as well as Asp himself, and it was clear to him as it could never have been to some Warrior of the Voice who had only seen King Asp rarely and from a distance, if at all, that the strange sun-fire yellow of the boy's eyes could never be mistaken for the royal amber of a true King's eyes. So, in his mercy, he granted Ri Tal and Kuan their son's life.

When he learned that his son was to live, Ri Tal contrived to extend his residence in Chal another year. The clay for the boy's thirteen baptisms had to come from the same earth, and it would have been folly unthinkable to subject an unnamed child to the rigors of the journey to Kyborash. Though Chal was only nine days downriver from Kyborash, the Nacre's powerful currents rendered traffic back up the river impossible, and the return trip took forty-three days by oxcart.
The first night of each full moon Ri Tal painted his son with wet clay and chanted ritual words over him. From each baptism the potter saved the clay with which he had anointed the boy's forehead. This Ri Tal placed in a cool, secret place, and there it was seen by no one but himself.
On the first night of the first full moon following the boy's one-year day, Ri Tal took the clay from its place of concealment and, covering it with the skin of a freshly killed male goat to keep the moonlight from defiling it, carried it into the room where he did what little working of the clay his administrative duties allowed him.
The room was in utter darkness, sealed from all light for two days, and no one but Ri Tal had been allowed to enter it. During that time he had consecrated the room and all it contained to Sartor many times; now, in the darkness, Ri Tal drew blood from his right arm with a knife of chipped stone. This blood he consecrated and kneaded into the clay; then, working by touch alone, he molded the clay around the stone blade and began the fashioning of the dolthe figurine in which his son's soul was to be embodied. It was a strange dolthe, its
shape revealed to him in a dream imperfectly grasped; yet as he worked the clay he felt its recalcitrance leave it and he knew that Sartor was working through him.
He wrapped the finished dolthe in damp cloths to keep the soul from drying too quickly and cracking, then sealed the room behind him with his cylinder seal.
He did not return again until the moon was full. He uncovered the window-a narrow slit, set high in the wall-then removed the cloths and for the first time saw the shape his hands had molded.
The dolthe was strange, far stranger than he had realized, a thing of curves and angles, hollows and protuberances, yet it was beautiful and he could feel its power. His son's soul was well embodied.
He thanked Sartor, then sealed the room again and began gathering the woods with which to make the charcoal he would need to fire the figurine. It was no ordinary soul, and no ordinary mixture of grasses, dung and oakwood would do. Ri Tal carefully collected acacia wood and the roots of the hill-loving sari grasses; with these he mixed chips of gummy sarbatu wood stored under hides since the previous summer. The kiln had already been exorcised and consecrated to Sartor and to the nameless Earth Mother. Ri Tal placed the wood in it and, covering the kiln with a layer of earth, kindled the wood by slow degrees until he had the charcoal he desired.
This too he consecrated. Then he fired his son's soul. Had the dolthe cracked in the firing his son would have been condemned to life as a potter-pariah, unable to work anything beyond baseware,
but Ri Tal was a Master Potter and not given to carelessness. Sartor favored him: the dolthe did not crack.
Taking the fired soul from the kiln, he realized that part of it had the shape of the great scarlet-winged moth found nowhere but in Kyborash.
His usename will be Moth, Ri Tal thought, well pleased. He painted the soul with glazes of his own discovery and fired it again. When he removed it from the kiln it was banded orange and purple, while a single knife-edged projection jutting from its side gleamed a metallic copper.
His truename will be Sartor-ban-i-Tresh, Sartor of the Setting Sun, Ri Tal thought, and again he was pleased: it was a name of good omen, for in Ashlu the setting sun was reckoned the beginning of the new day.
Ri Tal dictated a letter asking Ri Cer Sil's permission to return home, then arranged for the inscribed clay tablet's shipment to Kyborash.
While he awaited the Ri Sil's reply he fashioned Moth the glazed clay toys that only a potter's son might own, the tiny bowls and balls and manikins, the ceramic flutes that only potters were permitted to play, the tiny oxcart with its four wheels attached with leather thongs.
When Ri Larshu, his replacement, finally arrived on the barge from Kyborash two months later, Ri Tal spent seven impatient days instructing the man in the current state of affairs in Chal, in the subtleties of the ceramic trade with the cities of the Delta League, and in the various offerings to be given Sartor in each of Chal's many temples. Then he loaded his wife, child, and belongings aboard an oxcart, making sure Moth's dolthe was well hidden where it would be safe from harm, and set out for Kyborash. The journey was arduous, but no more so than was to be expected. Since all the peoples between Chal and Kyborash were subject to King Asp-and since the oxcart obviously contained little to attract brigands-they made the voyage without incident.
Ri Tal had never enjoyed his life as an administrator. He was anxious to return to Kyborash and to working the Earth Mother's clays.
In later years Moth remembered nothing of Chal, nor of the journey. His earliest memory was of playing in the dirt in front of his father's house in Kyborash.
He was a strong, even-tempered boy, with hair dappled the red of the metalsmiths and the black of his potter father. One eyebrow was red, the other black, while his skin was a deep brown. He spent the years before his initiation like any other master artisan's child, playing with his friends whenever he could steal time away from helping with the womanswork or weeding the vegetable gardens and the barley field.

Chapter Two

Moth's teeth were chattering. It was just after dawn on the morning of his seventh birthday, and he and his cousin Tramu were huddled together with two dozen other children looking at the body of a dead lion. The lion lay at the far end of one of the Temple barley fields, almost in the irrigation ditch; two black-fletched arrows protruded from its body and a third stuck out of its neck. The children had congregated silently, as if by instinct. None of them had thought to inform an adult.
The King! Moth thought, for lions were sacred and only King Asp was permitted to hunt them. Perhaps if I wait I'll see the King!
"What if it's just playing dead?" Rafti asked, breaking the silence. She was eight, the same age as Tramu, and her hair was as red as his, but she was still a child. Girls stayed children until they married. "Lions do that," she continued. "My father told me."
"It's dead," Tramu said. "Look at the arrows sticking out of it."

"Maybe it's just wounded and pretending to be dead until we get close to it," Rafti said, excited by the idea.
"No." Moth pointed at the carcass. "See? There are flies on its eyes."
"So?" Rafti demanded. "A lion pretended to be dead so it could kill King Vitrus. Father told me."
"Nobody cares what your father says," Dilea said. She was a weaver's daughter, and though younger than Moth was already a head taller than he was. "Everybody knows that story."
"Besides, that was for King Vitrus. For a King," Golgin said. He was round and fat, with protruding eyes and an incongruously long head. Moth hated him: he was a bully like his father, Snae Tka, the tax collector.
The last time Golgin's father had come to collect the summertax, he'd thrown down the jar of barley he was rummaging through, breaking it and spilling the precious grain, then grabbed Moth by the nose. His eyes staring from sunken sockets like the eyes of an ancient ferret-fierce, bright, hating-the tax collector had twisted the boy's nose and demanded the secret of Ri Tal's hidden wealth. Moth had known nothing, said nothing, though he had been unable to keep himself from crying.
"You don't have anything to worry about, Rafti," Golgin continued. "No lion's going to put up with flies in its eyes for anybody less than a King. Oh, for a beautiful princess, maybe-but not for a second-rate silversmith's ugly little daughter."
Rafti glared at Golgin and Moth thought she was going to spit on him, but an instant later she'd turned from the Snae's son to glare at him. It's not my fault, he wanted to say. Don't look at me like that, look at Golgin.
He said nothing.
"It's dead," Tramu said. "Let's go get a good look at it." He began walking across the field, the other children following hesitantly. Moth could see the black blood matting the honey-colored fur and silver mane. It was a big, big lion.
He ignored the commotion behind him until he felt his mother's all-too-familiar grip on his wrist.