"Ball, Margaret - Shadow Gate, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ball Margaret)

PROLOGUE
Thirtieth year of Queen AlianoraЧIn this year the harvests failed, so that many poor folk, both mortals and elvenkind, had suffered but for die Queen's charity in giving of grain from the royal stores.
One hundredth year of Queen AlianoraЧThe harvests having been poor these three years due to the inclement conditions, and the royal stores of grain being exhausted, the queen of her mercy remitted the third part of the tax due from every household within the royal demesne.
One hundred twenty-third year of the reign of Alianora called Queen of the ElvenkindЧIn this year departed the elven-loving Order of Saint Francis from these lands, the monastery, outbuildings, and serfs being now under the gentle and merciful rule of our own Order of Saint Durand, and may God blast with His fires all heretics and ill-disposed who resist the change.
One hundred fiftieth year of the reign of Alianora called Queen of the ElvenkindЧIn this year departed many of the lords of Elvenkind to join their cursed brothers the Jinni in Outremer, they saying that the land was too poor to sup-
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port them, and now by the mercy of God may we pray for better harvests that these soulless ones are gone from the land, and may the rest of their detestable sort follow them that the curse on the land may be withdrawn!
ЧExtiacts from the Chronicle of Remigius Monastery
Alianora, Countess of Poitiers, Duchess of Aquitaine, Regent of the Garronais and Queen of the Middle Realm, held court in her palace at Poitiers.
In the hushed blue evening the stains and crumbling cracks in the palace walls were barely evident; the flaws of age were softened, hidden in the hazy sweet-scented air, swirled away by mists and illusion until the casual observer saw only a vision of perfection rising above the encircling ring of the gardens: white walls and slender white columns, spiral stairways rising as sharply and sweetly as an aubade, high pointed roofs shimmering with the iridescence of seastone brought all the way from the sandy shores of the Garronais.
A garden of sweet herbs and flowering trees encircled the palace, and beyond that, a wall of silence and invisible forces warded it against the hubbub of the dense-packed medieval city. In the streets of Poitiers a carter swore at his oxen and lashed them until they lurched forward and all but overturned his stuck cart, a mason defying guild regulations by working past sunset swore even more vehemently when the carter's load of quarried stone tumbled against the back of the cart with danger of cracks and flaws, a wine-shop keeper shouted the virtues of his wares to calm the men's tempers and an impudent girl threatened to report them both to the burgesses of the city if they didn't give her a sip from their cups.
Within the palace garden, a scant hundred feet
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away, the Lords of Elfhame watched in appreciative silence and listened to the slow reluctant rustling of a rose unfurling its petals, brought from bud to full bloom in the course of one evening by the Lady Vielle's magic. Upstairs, those who were disinclined for such frivolous amusements paced a hall whose floors of pink-veined marble were worn smooth from many hundreds of years of such pacings, and discussed the future of the realm in low worried voices.
"Roses and moonlight!" burst out a thin golden-haired man when he heard the murmur of applause from the gardens. 'Time was when the Lady Vielle's grandsire would have raised the winds and the waves to be his horses, and the court would have ridden from Poitiers to Outremer in one night's joyous adventure, with the water-horses foaming white beneath us and their haunches surging with the power of the tide. That was the High Magic! And now we toy with flowers while the Mortal Realms press in upon us daily."
His voice carried to the gardens below. "If you have the power to raise the water-horses, Lord Yrthan, be sure I shall ride one," Lady Vielle called up, "Until then . . . perhaps you would care to demonstrate your strength by turning my rose into a green growing tree?" Her sharp mocking laughter was echoed by the dancing notes of a lute played by the mortal jongleur who stood behind her.
Yrthan's right hand clenched and he made a quick casting gesture over the balcony. A shower of gray sparks flitted down upon the elvenltind assembled in the garden, sparkling and stinging where they landed. The petals of the rose turned gray, then black, and it drooped in Vielle's hand and gave off a stench of something long dead and rotting in stagnant water. With a little cry of dismay Vielle withdrew her hand, shaking the last of the gray sparks off her long fingers. She and her friends retreated to the shelter of
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the lower terrace, trailed after by the mortal jongleur with his lute.
Yrthan's companions wrinkled their noses at the foul smell that arose from the dead iwe.
"I meant only to let it age, to make her see the petals felling," Yrthan murmured in apology, shaking his head. "The simplest magics go awry these days."
"And we're no more use than those children."
The High Lords of Elvenkind moved inside. In the garden, now that none of the elvenkind were watching, the walls of silence shook a little under the pressure of all the human noise outside, and a trace of a girl's tipsy song came through the rift. The rose was a bud on its bush as it had always been, freed of the illusions cast by Vielle and Yrthan, and with its inmost nature untouched by their weak magics.
And in die innermost chamber of the palace, a windowless room shrouded by silks woven by the Jinn of Outremer, Aiianora d'Aquitaine wove her plans to restore the strength of Elmame to its former glory.
In her three-hundredth year the Lady of the Middle Realm appeared untouched and smooth as a young girl. She was not as fair as most of the elvenkind; honey-brown hair streaked with gold fell loosely around a face gilded with the touch of the desert sun. That coloring was a memento of her first mortal marriage; riding on crusade to Outremer, barely tolerated by the good mortal clerics of the party for her friendship with the Jinn who guided them, she had been amused and delighted to discover that with enough sun, eiven skin could change color just as that of mortals did. Pleased with the effect of this golden skin setting off her elven-pale eyes, she had maintained the tint for decades with only a little effort. It was not solely a matter of vanity; she liked to keep the conservative elder lords tike Yrthan a little worried, to remind them that their liege lady
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was an unpredictable person with a strange taste for marrying mortals.
The man who attended her was one of the youngest in her realm; Berengar, Count of the Garronais, subject to the regency of Aiianora until he attained his majority in some fifty years. In mortal years he was old enough to have ruled his own lands for two decades; as the Lords of Elvenkind counted time, a man of thirty-five was an impetuous youth, barely out of leading-strings and hardly to be trusted with control of any lands more extensive than his nursery garden.
Aiianora, who had married two mortal kings, had a slightly different view of time and maturity. Her second husband had been no older than Berengar when they married, and a year later he had won the English crown. Of course, mortals were hastened towards maturity by their tragically short life-spans, like a flower forced to bud and bloom in a night by a trivial forcing-spell; still, there were circumstances in which a man like Berengar might be of more use to her than the counselors who usually surrounded her. Yrthan and his friends would have known that what she proposed was impossible, unwise, a defiance of die basic tenets of Elfliame and far too dangerous to be contemplated for a moment, lest what remained of their failing powers be destroyed in a moment. Berengar was young enough to attempt the impossible.
And besides, he was rich in the wealth that meant more to the elvenkind than any lands or gold. While Berengar still knelt, head bowed, before her, Alianora's glance strayed to the boy who knelt beside him. Kieran of Gwyneth, Berengar's fosterling.
It was part of the natural balance of things that the elvenkind, who lived for hundreds of years, should rarely bear children and should prize them above all things. Every elfin child grew up petted and cherished, surrounded by grave lords and great ladies
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who accounted it a rare honor to have their braids pulled or their backs commandeered for games of knights on horseback, loved and petted and brought gently into the way of the people. As they grew into their powers they were taught control of those powers and of their own emotions; people who could raise a storm or flatten a hayfield with an angry gesture had to learn very early not to make any gesture without thought for the consequences. And so the children were doubly cherished, once for their rarity and again for the freedom that their ignorance and relative weakness gave them. Alone among the elvenkind, the children cried and laughed, sang and raced and fought and gave way to the demands of the moment. Every elven child, before he began to reach the age at which his powers would become manifest, was a spoiled and petted darling, indulged in a way the mortalkind would judge sheer foolishness.
Every child but one. Kieran was the last child to be born to an elven couple in twenty years, and he had not been spoiled as was the birttu-ight of every elven child. His parents had died untimely and he had been raised by a mortal couple, fishers on the Welsh coast. They brought him up overstrictly, fearing his elven powers and not knowing when or how they might become manifest. At ten, angry, confused by his developing powers, knowing that his mortal parents feared him and not understanding why, he had stowed away on a fishing boat to find his elvenkind in Brittany. Berengar had discovered him by chance, a boy of ten raging at the sea that would not obey him, desperate and angry and lost and starving, and had promptly claimed the boy as his fosterling.
Now, at twelve, Kieran was as steady and controlled as any elven child approaching his time of power, but without the legacy of love and laughter that should have been his. And the need for that control was debatable. Once we raised the waves for
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our steeds and rode the air, Alianora thought, unconsciously mirroring Yrthan's complaints. Now most of our arts are illusion, and we know not what rides the clouds. Even in this interior chamber, protected by walls and hangings and halls and gardens, from time to time she could hear the mortal clamor of her city of Poitiers breaking through the wards of silence that should have kept the High Queen's palace inviolate. Those noises raised echoes in her mind of the troubling rumors that had begun in the Middle Realm, and of some troubles that were more than rumor. It was said that those bound to darkness were free again; true, the Wild Hunt fed on mortal souls and not on the elvenkind, but the binding that held them had been of elven making, and it was a poor omen for the future should that centuries-old spell fail now.
It was also said that the lands of the Middle Realm shrank year by year, passing into the hands of mortal lords as the elvenkind lost their old power to control the tides and the seasons and the growing things in the land; and this Alianora knew was no rumor. And her best hope for renewing the strength of the Realm was in this impetuous elf-lad who knelt before her, a child raising a child, and both of them centuries too young to know anything about the catastrophe that had befallen their people before they were born.
"My lord Berengar." At the sound of Alianora's voice the young man looked up. "How much do you know about the Catastrophe?" Before he could speak, she waved him to his feet with an imperious gesture. "Oh, stand up, man. I did not have you brought here to play at games of court rituals. I apologize for having let you kneel so longЧI was thinking, but that is no excuse."
"The Queen of Elfhame needs no excuse."
Fleetingly Alianora allowed herself to remember her second mortal husband. Henry Plantagenet would never have knelt so long in reverent silence; no, in
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the time she'd sat thinking here, he'd have tumbled her into bed between a quip and a jest, gotten another of their strange half-blood sons on her body and ridden away to conquer some place or set some new laws in force. The elvenkind paid a high price in silence and control for their powers and their long life. Could this grave young man, so proper, so restrained, really serve her need?
If not, their case was hopeless. 'The Catastrophe, Berengar?" she prompted sharply.
The young man looked up at the pattern of intertwined knots carved around the ceiling. Fists on hips, his short cloak thrown hack, he seemed, to be searching for the answer in another world. "The Stones of Jura were once the seat of all power in Elmame. Their magic flowed into die land, and we took it from the land. Lord Joflroi of Brittany thought to take their power into himself by the help of a wizard's apprentice who had stolen the secrets of mortal magecraft. The Lady Sybille, who was then the Queen of the Middle Realm, learned of his intention and confronted him within the circle of the Stones. No one knows what happened then, but that they both diedЧthe apprentice, too, I suppose, but our accounts don't say what happened to the boyЧ and the power of the Stones was lost to Elfhame."
"No one knows even that much," Alianora corrected him, more sharply than she had intended. "What makes you think they both died there?"
Berengar looked confused, and more elven than before, when he'd seemed like a perfectly correct statue. "WhyЧwhy, so I had it from my tutor, and it is written so in the scrolls of the great library at Ys."
"Yes. So it is written," Alianora agreed. Too impatient to remain still longer, she rose and paced the length of the small chamber. "My lord Berengar, would you request your page to bring us some wine?"
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"Kieran?" Berengar's hand ruffled the page's thick hair.