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

And now we were seven, and I think we all knew that for the time being
there wouldn't be any more of us.

The others came later. We were an oddly assorted group, I'll grant
you, but the fact that we lived in separate towers helped to keep down
the frictions to some degree.

The addition of Beldin to our fellowship was not as disruptive as I'd
first imagined it might be. This is not to say that our ugly little
brother mellowed very much, but rather that we grew accustomed to his
irascible nature as the years rolled by. I invited him to stay in my
tower with me during what I suppose you could call his novitiate--that
period when he was Aldur's pupil before he achieved full status. I
discovered during those years that there was a mind lurking behind
those bestial features, and what a mind it was! With the possible
exception of Belmakor, Beldin was clearly the most intelligent of us
all. The two of them argued for years about points of logic and
philosophy so obscure that the rest of us hadn't the faintest idea of
what they were talking about, and they both enjoyed those arguments
enormously.

It took me a while, but I finally managed to persuade Beldin that an
occasional bath probably wouldn't be harmful to his health and that if
he bathed, the fastidious Belmakor might be willing to come close
enough to him that they wouldn't have to shout during their
discussions. As my daughter's so fond of pointing out, I'm not an
absolute fanatic about bathing, but Beldin sometimes carries his
indifference to extremes.

During the years that we lived and studied together, I came to know
Beldin and eventually at least partially to understand him. Mankind
was still in its infancy in that age, and the virtue of compassion
hadn't really caught on as yet. Humor, if you want to call it that,
was still quite primitive and brutal. People found any sort of anomaly
funny, and Beldin was about as anomalous as you can get. Rural folk
would greet his entry into their villages with howls of laughter, and
after they had laughed their fill, they'd normally stone him out of
town. It's not really very hard to understand his foul temper, is it?
His own people tried to kill him the moment he was born, and he'd spent
his whole life being chased out of every community he tried to enter.
I'm really rather surprised that he didn't turn homicidal. I probably
would have.

He had lived with me for a couple hundred years, and then on one rainy
spring day, he raised a subject I probably should have known would come
up eventually. He was staring moodily out the window at the slashing
rain, and he finally growled,

"I think I'll build my own tower."