"Dunsany, Lord - Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

him. They said:
"Sir, you have spoken blasphemy against the Sea."
And the young man muttered:
"She is more beautiful than the Sea."
And the kings said:
"We are older than you and wiser, and know that nothing
is more beautiful than the Sea."
And the young man took off the gear of his head, and
became downcast, and knew that he spake with kings, yet he
answered:
"By this spear, she is more beautiful than the Sea."
And all the while the Princess stared at him, knowing him
to be a hunter of gariachs.
Then the King of Arizim said to the watcher by the pool:
"If thou wilt go up Poltarnees and come back, as none
have come, and report to us what lure or magic is in the
Sea, we will pardon thy blasphemy, and thou shalt have the
Princess to wife and sit among the Council of the Kings."
And gladly thereunto the young man consented. And the
Princess spoke to him, and asked him his name. And he told
her that his name was Athelvok, and great joy arose in him
at the sound of her voice. And to the three kings he
promised to set out on the third day to scale the slope of
Poltarnees and to return again, and this was the oath by
which they bound him to return:
"I swear by the Sea that bears the worlds away, by the
river of Oriathon, which men call Ocean, and by the gods and
their tiger, and by the doom of the worlds, that I will
return again to the Inner Lands, having beheld the Sea."
And that oath he swore with solemnity that very night in
one of the temples of the Sea, but the three kings trusted
more to the beauty of Hilnaric even than to the power of the
oath.
The next day Athelvok came to the palace of Arizim with
the morning, over the fields to the East and out of the
country of Toldees, and Hilnaric came out along her balcony
and met him on the terraces. And she asked him if he had
ever slain a gariach, and he said that he had slain three,
and then he told her how he had killed his first down by the
pool in the wood. For he had taken his father's spear and
gone down to the edge of the pool, and had lain under the
azaleas there waiting for the stars to shine, by whose first
light the gariachs go to the pools to drink; and he had gone
too early and had had long to wait, and the passing hours
seemed longer than they were. And all the birds came in
that home at night, and the bat was abroad, and the hour of
the duck went by, and still no gariach came down to the
pool; and Athelvok felt sure that none would come. And just
as this grew to a certainty in his mind the thicket parted
noiselessly and a huge bull gariach stood facing him on the