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

But he was devoutly grateful that Rotrou did not stay to test Berengar's own powers of illusion on the scanty meal of boiled grain and milk that awaited him below.
From Berengar's keep on the clifls of the Garron to the hillside village of St.-Remy, the last outcropping of cultivable land before the forest and fields gave way to barren uplands, was a long hot ride for a summer afternoon, and no journey for an aging man who was already tired. Berengar felt guilty for his own selfish relief that Rotrou had chosen to continue
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on to the Durandine monastery, guilty for not urging him harder to stay, and relieved at the sight of clouds darkening the sky and the feel of a cool rain-scented wind blowing down from the north. At least the clouds would mitigate the heat of the day and make this last part of the journey easier on the old
man.
"It looks like a storm brewing," observed Rotrou as they rode out at the head of his little train of guards and clerks and pack-mules with the bishop's formal vestments and his fur-lined cloak and his own linen sheets all following along in neat bundles. "Are you sure you wish to accompany me, my son? You'll hardly be able to return to your keep before dark."
"Then 111 beg a bed and a bite to eat from my villagers in St.-Remy," Berengar replied. "They'll be honored to serve their lord." He did not add that the villagers' coarse bread and sour cheese would be a more substantial meal than awaited him at home.
Rotrou shot him another of those puzzling sharp glances. "Will they indeed? I'm glad to know you have such good relations with your people. These Garronnais are a surly lot; I'd hardly have thought they would welcome a lord of their own race into their homes, much less one of the elvenkind."
"The folk of St.-Remy have reason to like the elvenkind," Berengar pointed out. "The Durandines are eager to get their land, and you know what follows wherever those new monks get land; they turn off the people and build walls to enclose their monasteries in solitude. While I hold this part of the Garronais, they shan't dispossess any of my people so." He did not mention his other reason for refusing the Durandine offers to buy his land. They would have taken not only the village of St.-Remy but much of the forest beyond it, including die glade where the Stonemaidens of the Garronais kept their silent watch. Berengar had been shocked by Auanora's
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cool summary of how many of the stone circles had passed out of elven hands; even when the present need for a Gate had passed, Berengar was determined not to let the Stonemaidens fell into mortal control.
"Yes. The Durandines are hard to refuse," Rotrou said neutrally. "Some people think they take too literally the commandment of their founder, to go forth and live in the desert."
Berengar's laugh was harsh enough to startle his gentle horse. "The English writer Walter Map said that wherever they go, they either find a desert or make one. Well, the barren section of uplands where they founded the monastery of Remigius is near enough to a desert; but I've no mind to see my own forest and my own villagers suffer such a fete,"
"Harvests have been poor recently, have they not? What if your villagers began to leave the land?1^'
"That won't happen. They are very attached to their homes."
"Really? I'm gratified to hear it." Rotrou paused while their horses negotiated a tricky, narrow bit of path where the forest came down to the cliff edge. When die way broadened, he beckoned Berengar back to his side so that they could resume their desultory conversation. "And grateful, too," he went on as though there had been no pause, "for your taking so much time to escort an old man of another race to his destination. Surely you have duties elsewhere on your lands?"
Berengar glanced up the path. In a few miles it would divide, the straight way leading to the circle of the Stonemaidens and the leftward branch following the steep riverside cliffs to the village of St-Remy. The stormclouds looked blacker up ahead; he hoped that Kieran wasn't getting a drenching.
"I trust my retainers," he said. When the messengers came to announce that Bishop Rotrou approached
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and requested guides to lead his retinue through the walls of illusion, Kieran had been overjoyed at the chance to take his lord's place watching at the stone circle. It would have been a gross discourtesy, as well as giving rise to some suspicion, if Berengar had foiled to greet this old mortal friend personally. He had considered asking one of his elven knights to take the watch, but Alianora had been strict about the need for secrecy. Kieran seemed the safer choice. The boy had already guessed that something was afoot at the Stonemaidens; his loyalty was absolute and his young face would be a sweet greeting to the Lady Sybille, should she by chance pass through the Gate that very afternoon.
Only now, as he watched the deepening storm, Berengar reflected that Kieran's discretion was possibly not as absolute as his loyalty. The boy was too young to be able to ward off such a pelter of rain as was lashing the trees to the north. Might he be tempted to take shelter in a woodburner's hut? Berengar told himself that his fosterling was too fiercely loyal to forsake his post. He would probably glory in the chance of suffering a little under rain and hail. All the same, Berengar wished that he had not left his scrying-glass at the keep. Without that aid, and with the distraction of Rotrou's company, even his elven senses could not reach quite for enough to sense Kieran on guard at the Stonemaidens. He would have to make an excuse to separate from the party for a few minutes, to cast forward in trance.
As they neared the fork in the path, Berengar rode ahead of the bishop so that he could reach forth to Kieran in peace. His mare, well-trained against these moments of abstraction, picked her way gently along the broad trail until she reached the place where the path split into two. There she waited for the light mental pressure that was the elf-lord's equivalent of a rein against the neck. No guidance came; she low-
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ered her head to the roadside and began noisily munching on the sweet grasses that grew out of the ditch. There were flowers, too: blue lady's-veil with the sweet white centers, and spicy golden dragons-breath. Delicious! She abandoned all attempts to wake her master.
Wrapped in his trance of questing, Berengar was still distantly aware of the mare's pause and of everything else that was going on around him. One part of his mind tasted the sweet crunchiness of the lady's-veil and the spicy tang of the golden dragonsbreath, heard the bells on the rein of the bishop's fat white horse coming up behind him and the rustling and creaking and gossiping of the bishop's retinue. He could sense the feelings of those behind him, too, not as thoughts put into words, but more like something as tangible as the hard leather of a saddle or the cool wind rustling through the treetops. This questing talent was what gave the elvenkind the name of mind readers, though any who had experienced it knew that the sense was both less and more than the ability to read precise thoughts. It was more a perception of emotions, no more than any sensitive mortal could achieve by paying attention to those around him. Without really thinking about it, Berengar felt the mare's enjoyment of the tasty flowers, the tangle of complex issues and personalities that filled the bishop's mind, the weariness and amusement and boredom and peacefulness that variously occupied the members of his retinue.
He sensed, too, a hard sharp kernel of hatred for himself and all his kind, somewhere in the train behind him; and he flinched away from that without examining it more closely, for fear the hatred and his involuntary response would break the light trance of questing. That would be Hugh, the bishop's Durandine clerk, taught by his order and his own fears to hate the elvenkind as distinctly, unforgiveably, incurably
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different. It was a pity, thought Berengar, that so kindly a man as Bishop Rotrou should have a man like Hugh in his entourage. On the other hand, it was tactful of the bishop to bring his Durandme clerk on an episcopal visit to the Durandine monastery, to show the brothers that the members of then-order who went into the world were treated as well as any other clerics. Doubtless that was why he had done it, trusting in Berengar to understand the reason without explanations.
And all this thinking was distracting him from the quest. Once again Berengar spread out his elven senses. Eyes closed, he imagined a gossamer web of delicate strands floating out through the forest, stretching ever wider and thinner until it encompassed all the land as far as the circle of standing stones where Kieran stood watch.
This time he did not allow himself to be distracted by the pungent mix of feelings from the approaching riders; yet still he could feel nothing, no other thinking presence, anywhere near the Stonemaidens. No elf, no mortal, not even a small demon or a nixie. The brightest flickers of consciousness in the vicinity came from the small fish in the stream; and they were like fireflies flickering in the darkness, where he had expected to find Kieran's consciousness burning as bright as a torch.
Berengar cast the net of his senses wider again and yet again. NothingЧno, there was something to the east! He sent tendrils of thought out that way and cried out in shock. Fire and agony and terror of death struck at the delicate web of questing, tearing and parting the net he had constructed. And behind that pain-filled terror was something worse, a cold consciousness that feasted on death and suffering. Berengar felt as if his mind were freezing and burning where he had contacted the alien sense. He reeled in the saddle and fell forward across his mare's
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neck, gratefully clutching the warm solid reality of her mane.
Coming out of quest-trance so quickly, and so wounded, was like fighting one's way up from a sea-floor where seaweeds tangled about the feet and watermaidens twined their white arms about his neck. Berengar ached with the need to reach the sunlit realm of the forest path where his body lay over the mare, he could see it and he strove upwards to it but reaching it was agonizingly slow. And when he broke through to the surface of reality, the bright colors and undampened sounds and sharp surfaces of the world struck his trance-sharpened senses like so many blows.
The bishop and his followers had come up with him; there were men on horseback ringing him round, looking down with stern disapproving mortal foces made expressionless by the metal helms that framed them. And one severe young face, framed in the dark hood of the Durandine order, held an expression of deep distaste.
"It would seem that the elfling has had a fit," said Hugh, the bishop's clerk, as though Berengar were still unconscious. "Such is the price of working his dark wizardry! My lord, best you leave him here; I warned you not to be contaminated by such a one."
"I'm sure you did," said Berengar before Bishop Rotrou could speak. "But it's I must leave you here, my lord, with my apologies." He would not speak of Kieran's puzzling disappearance from the circle of the Stonemaidens; Alianora had warned him most strictly against giving mortals, or even elflords of the opposition party, any hint of the gamble they risked there. His heart ached to ride for the Stonemaidens and search for his vanished fosterling. But he was lord of a wide land, and there was worse need elsewhere than at the Stonemaidens, and worse trouble afoot than any Kieran could have encountered at that peaceful stone circle.
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"My son, you're in no case to ride on!" Bishop Rotrou cried out in protest as Berengar took up the silken threads that served as reins to his elf-trained mount. "I don't know what happened to you when you went on ahead of us just now, and I don't want to know." His fingers flickered in the sign of the cross. "But I do know that you need rest now. Do you return to your keep, and we will go on our way without your help."
"No, my lord," said Berengar mildly. "There's some evil afoot at St.-Remy, and I can reach there before you and your mortal guardЧalthough I'll be glad to know you are coming up behind me, for I couldn't tell from my questing whether iron blades or elven wordings are wanted to cure this ill."
Or whether either toiU serve us, he added in his own mind, and he could tell from the look on Bishop Rotrou's heavy-jowled face that the good bishop was again reading his thoughts more accurately than any elf-lord could have sensed them.
"Go with God, then," said the bishop. He lifted his hand for a blessing as Berengar's mare sprang forward, obedient to the unspoken command and as light on her unshod hooves as elven powers could make her.
Hugh will give him hell for blessing a soulless elf, Berengar thought with wry amusement; and then he tried not to think at all, as the air rushed by his face and the trees beside the path whisked by at dizzying speed and the mare carried him forward to face the strange evil that had already wounded him, even when he did no more than brush it with the outermost tendrils of his thoughts.
CHAPTER THREE
These are articles disapproved as against theological truth and disapproved by the chancellor of Paris, Eudes, and the masters teaching theology at Paris, A.D. 1240, the second Sunday after the octave of the Nativity,
First, that the elvenkind, being rational and sublunary creatures like humankind, are also possessed of souls which it is the duty of the Church to save. This error we condemn, and we excommunicate those asserting and defending it, by authority of William bishop of Paris.
Second, that the divine essence is....