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

"This isЧa spetlcast wind," Kieran panted. "I was at die Stonemaidens when it cameЧdie storm couldn't get within the circle. Wind sent to bring die clouds downЧmake it darkЧcan die Hunt ride at noon, if a wizard turns noon to night?"
No one knew die answer to diat. No one cared to know. For just dien the silver sound of a hunting
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horn echoed through the sky, cold as ice and still as death. The villagers dropped their tools and left the sheaves of wheat standing in the fields.
It was only a few hundred yards to the nearest houses; by the time Kieran had got his breath back and stumbled to his feet, the first of the villagers were already safe. The horn sounded again, and this time it was accompanied by the long baying note of a hound sighting its quarry. The achingly sweet music of the horn robbed Kieran's legs of all strength; his knees were about to bend under him when a girl's hand pinched his arm and then dragged him upright again.
"Come on, elf-boy!" the girl sobbed. "You ran this ferЧyou can come a little farther."
Kieran leaned on her and she staggered under his weight. He recognized her now: Maud, the bridge-keeper's crippled daughter. Not a girl. A woman of eighteen, but thin and wasted from the curse that had twisted her hip at birth. And not strong. He must lead her, not lean on her.
And there wasn't time. He could see the red eyes of the hounds now, glowing through the pale translucent gray of their shadow-bodies; and the horn's cold music never stopped; and all the others were within doors now, tumbling in helter-skelter and locking and barring doors and windows behind them. Maud couldn't run, and he was too tired, and the music took all the strength out of his soul; and maybe no one would dare to let them in if they did reach the shelter of the houses.
"You shouldn't have stayed," he said tiredly. With the hounds so close, now circling to cut them off from the village, his confidence that they would not hunt one of the elvenldnd was leaking away from him. It was going to be hard enough to raise what little powers of illusion he possessed to defend himself; he resented having to defend this mortal woman
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too. "Why did you stay? You know you can't run; you should have gone at once."
"And leave you?"
She was pale now, and pressed close to him as if she thought his elvish body could give her mortal warmth and comfort. Very frightened, Kieran thought So was he. The hounds were on the earth now, prowling round them in a diminishing circle. He could see the shapes of wheat-sheaves and houses and trees and the stone tower of the church through their ghostly bodies.
"Don't worry," Kieran told her. "They don't want me, not an elf, I've no soul for them to take; and 111 cover us both with illusion so that they won't dare to come near you either."
As he filled both hands with elflight and threw it outward to blaze in a ring about them, he hoped he had been telling the truth.
Near its rising place, the river Garron runs between the steep clifls which it has carved out of the soft stone of the Garronais, and this narrow course forces the river into a continual splashing of ripples and rainbow-scented spray and sparkling little falls. Farther down, towards the coast, the land is lower and the riverbed fans out into a smooth, sluggish sheet of water and reeds creeping across the sands of tile Garronais. But in the forested uplands where Berengar of the Garronais had his keep, the river splashed and sang to itself and threw up arcs of misty spray so that there was a perpetual glimmering of rainbows along the cliff edge. Shapes of towers and turrets and staircases arching into nowhere dazzled the eyes of unwary travelers who had heard, but not quite believed, the tales of the river-mirages of the Garronais.
These shimmering, evanescent images were the guardians of Berengar's keep. The real towers with
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their outer walls of iridescent seastone were concealed among a host of shifting, rainbow-colored illusions that looked sometimes like hills and trees, sometimes like barren gorges; the mist and spray that rose from the river were subtly enhanced by additional, illusory waterfalls; and a final spell of disquiet ensured that no traveler not of elven blood could stare for long into the misty illusions without feeling a vague discomfort, a fear without reason and a yearning to be somewhere else entirely.
And none of these safeguards, as Bishop Rotrou tactlessly pointed out, would be any protection at all against a band of mortal soldiers armed with iron weapons and guided by a Durandine mage.
"Or a renegade elf," Berengar politely agreed, "for we do quarrel among ourselves, and who knows but one of the elder lords might not offer his services to a mortal army bent upon my destruction? Fortunately, I have no enemies,"
"I wish that were true," said Rotrou heavily.
Hie bishop of the scattered parishes of the Garronais was an old man in mortal terms, nearing his sixtieth year, but he was still strong enough to ride on his episcopal visitations and with a fist heavy enough to put the fear of God into any delinquent parish priest. Long years of mediating between the elven lords of the region and their mortal tenants had left lines on his heavy face and had drawn his thick black brows together in a permanent frown. Beneath eyes as bright and penetrating as ever, his jowls sagged tiredly and his broad shoulders were now slumped from the weariness of his long ride.
Berengar had known the bishop all his life, but the man's bounding energy and enthusiasm had concealed from him, until this visit, the changes brought by age. He signalled one of his mortal pages to pour more wine, and tried to conceal the pity he felt when he looked upon Rotrou's tired face. When I first
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grew into my powers, he was a young man; and before I attain my majority, he'll be dead. No wonder mortals are short-tempered and impatient. So little time!
"Do not trouble yourself on my account, my son," said Bishop Rotrou tranquilly. "I have all eternity to look forward to, while you have only your span of years on this earthЧlong though they may be compared with ours, still they are finite."
Berengar's hand shook a little, and the red wine of Burgundy that the page had just poured slopped over the edges of his carved wooden mazer. "I have heard that mortal magecraft had improved considerably in the last years," he said carefully, "but I did not know that it extended to the reading of thoughts. And is it not forbidden a loyal son of the Church to dabble in such matters?"
Rotrou's rolling, generous chuckle took years from his appearance. "My son, it takes no great skill in mind reading to know what a young man thinks when he looks upon one growing old. Add to that my knowledge of how you elvenkind pity us mortals our short lives, and you'll see that there was no magecraft involved. But, as I said, the pity is unnecessary; we are in better case than you."
"I am familiar with the Church's doctrine," said Berengar mildly. He, like most elves, had no wish to quarrel with the official decision of the Bishop of ParisЧlater confirmed by Pope CaritasЧthat the elvenkind had no souls and hence could not come under the jurisdiction of Holy Church. That decision had ended a wave of heretic-burnings and elf-murders that threatened to tear apart all the kingdoms where elvenkind and mortals shared the land. Berengar sipped his wine more carefully and watched Rotrou under slanted brows, trying to gauge what to say next. It had seemed to him that the bishop was
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delivering an oblique warning; could that be why he had gone out of his way to visit this keep?
"And," Berengar resumed at last, "I do not think that you came to me, a youth in your world and a child in my own, to discuss high doctrinal questions of Christian theology. I am, of course, delighted that you chose to break your journey here. ..."
He let the sentence trail off, inviting some response from Rotrou.
The bishop sighed heavily and rubbed one hand over his face. "I am growing old, Berengar. It's a hard ride up from the coast."
Berengar pressed him to stay for the night with all the obligatory phrases of hospitality, all the while wondering how the resources of the keep could be stretched to feed the bishop and his extensive retinue. As the elvenkind lost their ability to ride the winds and move the rain clouds, harvests in this region and many others had grown thinner and poorer year after year. Berengar was lord of a hungry land, and on most nights he dined no better than his mortal peasants, on boiled grain with some milk and honey to lend it substance. Illusion, of course, could turn the meal into the semblance of roast peacocks and almond-sauced fish; but the elvenkind counted it poor hospitality to serve their guests illusory feasts. Magic should be used to enhance a noble reality, not to conceal poverty.
He was relieved when the bishop insisted that he must go on to the Durandine monastery of Remigius that very afternoon.
"It's near the boundaries of my lands," Berengar said, "not two miles, in feet, from my own village of St.-Remy. I'll ride with you that far, my lord."
Bishop Rotrou darted a sharp glance at Berengar. "But not, I take it, into the very monastery itself?"
"You know that the Durandine brothers have no love for my kind," Berengar replied. "And less for
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me, since I refused to sell them St.-Remy and the surrounding lands so that they could turn out the villagers and increase the empty territories about their monastery."
"Mmm." Bishop Rotrou nodded. "And has it occurred to you, Berengar, that the Durandines alone of our Christian orders are exempted from the prohibition against magecraft? I suspect that their stronger mages could even pierce the shield of illusions that guards this keep."
"Oh, I don't think the brothers are so eager for a little piece of pasture that they'd go to war against me." Berengar laughed, and hoped that he sounded as carefree as he pretended to be. "And if they didЧ well, my lord, we of the elvenkind have other kinds of illusion at our disposal, and other defenses besides illusion, if it comes to that. It has been a long time since any army of mortal men has cared to risk being transported to the sands of Outremer."
"It has also," said Rotrou, "been a long time since your grandsire performed that feat. Are the elvenkind still strong enough to work such wonders?"
Berengar laughed again. "Ask the men of your retinue, my lord, who had to ride here blindfolded and with elves leading their horses, because they could not abide the spells of aversion which surround my keep."