"Dragonlance - Chronicles Vol 4 - Dragons Of Summer Flame" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragonlance)

where the legends freeze
in remembered dew and the dawned mercury,
they ready the long vats in memory's custom pouring gold, pouring amber,
the old distillations
of grain, of bardic blood and ice and remembrance.
And into the waters the bard descends
into gold, into amber all the while listening
to the dark amniosis
of current and memory flowing about him,
until the lung, the dilating heart
give way in the waters, until he fills with listening
and the world rushes into him
deeper than thought, and he drowns or addles, or emerges a bard.
In the north it is done otherwise:
wisely under the moon where the phases labor
out of darkness to the light
of coins and mirrors in abundant freedoms of air.
I heard you were strangers to the wronged country where the bards descend,
to the waters where faith
transforms into vision, to the night's elixir,
to the last drowning breath
given over to memory where poetry comes, solitary.
I heard you were strangers
in the merciful north, that Hylo, Solamnia,
and a dozen unnameable provinces
cleansed you past envy,
past loneliness. Then the waters told me the truth:
how much you remember your deaths
where the halves of a kingdom unite in a lost terrain,
how you pass like moons, red and silver,
your destination celestial west, an alliance of mercy and light.
From the outset the heavens
had this in mind, a passage through darkness and suspect country,
its vanishing point in sunlight
in the air and the earth's
horizons- not drowning, nor the harp's flood.
O you have never forgotten
the bard's immersion, the
country of sleep, the time preceding the birth of the worlds
where all of us waited
in the mothering dark, in the death that the card foretells,
but alone and together you ride
into the dying the dying the story that means we are starting again . . .
Book 1

I
The Landing Party. The Prophecy.
An Unexpected Encounter
t was hot that morning, damnably hot.
Far too hot for late spring on Ansalon. Almost as hot as midsummer. The two knights, seated in the boat's