"David Eddings - Belgarath the Sorcerer (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

carried the guilt over that for almost half of my life. It's like a
knife twisting inside me. Garion knew that, and he coldly,
deliberately, used it to force me to take on this ridiculous project.
He knows that under these circumstances, I simply cannot refuse
anything my wife asks of me.

Poledra, of course, didn't put any pressure on me. She didn't have
to.

All she had to do was suggest that she'd rather like to have me go
along with the idea. Under the circumstances, I didn't have any
choice. I hope that the Rivan King is happy about what he's done to
me.

This is most certainly a mistake. Wisdom tells me that it would be far
better to leave things as they are, with event and cause alike half
buried in the dust of forgotten years. If it were up to me, I would
leave it that way.

The truth is going to upset a lot of people.

Few will understand and fewer still accept what I am about to set
forth, but as my grandson and son-in-law so pointedly insisted, if I
don't tell the story, somebody else will; and since I alone know the
beginning and middle and end of it, it falls to me to commit to
perishable parchment, with ink that begins to fade before it even
dries, some ephemeral account of what really happened--and why.

Thus, let me begin this story as all stories are begun, at the
beginning.

I was born in the village of Gara, which no longer exists. It lay, if
I remember it correctly, on a pleasant green bank beside a small river
that sparkled in the summer sun as if its surface were covered with
jewels-and I'd trade all the jewels I've ever owned or seen to sit
again beside that unnamed river.




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Our village was not rich, but in those days none were. The world was
at peace, and our Gods walked among us and smiled upon us. We had
enough to eat and huts to shelter us from the weather. I don't recall
who our God was, nor his attributes, nor his totem. I was very young
at the time, and it was, after all, long ago.

I played with the other children in the warm, dusty streets, ran