"Books - David Eddings - Belgarath the Sorcerer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

and sweat. I do not enjoy cutting down trees, for
example--particularly not with an axe. I broke that axe handle eight
times that summer--quite deliberately, I'll admit--and it miraculously
healed itself overnight. I hated that cursed, indestructible axe!

But strangely enough, it wasn't the sweating and grunting I resented
but the time I wasted whacking at unyielding trees that I could more
profitably have spent trying to read my way through that inexhaustible
bookshelf. Every page opened new wonders for me, and I groaned audibly
each time my Master suggested that it was time for me and my axe to go
out and entertain each other again.

And almost before I had turned around twice, winter came again. I had
better luck with my broom than I had with my axe. After all, you can
pile only so much dust in a corner before you start becoming obvious
about it, and my Master was never obvious. I continued to read my way
again and again along the bookshelf and was probably made better by it,
although my Master, guided by some obscure, sadistic instinct, always
seemed to know exactly when an interruption would be most unwelcome.

He inevitably selected that precise moment to suggest sweeping or
washing dishes or fetching firewood.

Sometimes he would stop what he was doing to watch my labors, a bemused
expression on his face. Then he would sigh and return to the things he
did that I didn't understand.

The seasons turned, marching in their stately, ordered progression as I
labored with my books and with the endless and increasingly difficult
tasks my Master set me. I grew bad-tempered and sullen, but never once
did I even think about running away.

Then perhaps three--or more likely it was five--years after I'd come to
the tower to begin my servitude, I was struggling one early winter day
to move a large rock that my Master had stepped around since my first
summer with him, but that he now found it inconvenient for some
reason.

The rock, as I say, was quite large, and it was white, and it was very,
very heavy. It would not move, though I heaved and pushed and strained
until I thought my limbs would crack. Finally, in a fury, I
concentrated my strength and all my will upon the boulder and grunted
one single word.

"Move!" I said.

And it moved! Not grudgingly with its huge inert weight sullenly
resisting my strength, but quite easily, as if the touch of one finger
would have been sufficient to send it bounding across the vale.