"David Eddings - The Elenium 3 - The Saphire Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

The Saphire Rose
David Eddings
The Ellenium
book 3
Finally the knight Sparhawk had come to possess Bhelliom, the
legendary jewel of magic. With it, he frees Queen Ehlana from the
crystalline cocoon that preserves her life, but Bhelliom carries
dangers of its own. And now Sparhawk is being stalked by a dark
lurking menace that is only the beginning of his troubles....


Prologue

Otha and Azash - Excerpted from A Cursory History of
Zemoch. Compiled by the History Department of the
University of Borrata.

Following the invasion of the Elenic-speaking peoples
from the steppes of central Daresia lying to the east, the
Elenes gradually migrated westward to displace the thinly
scattered Styrics who inhabited the Eosian continent.
The tribes which settled in 'Zemoch were latecomers,
and they were far less advanced than their cousins to
the west. Their economy and social organization were
simplistic, and their towns rude by comparison with the
cities which were springing up in the emerging western
kingdoms. The climate of Zemoch, moreover, was at
best inhospitable, and life there existed at the subsistence
level. The Church found little to attract her attention to so
poor and unpleasant a region, and as a result, the rough
chapels of Zemoch became largely unpastored and their
simple congregations untended. Thus the Zemochs were
obliged to take their religious impulses elsewhere. Since
there were few Elene priests in the region to enforce the
Church ban on consorting with the heathen Styrics, fraternization
became common. As the simple Elene peasantry
perceived that their Styric neighbours were able to reap
significant benefits from the use of the arcane arts, it
is perhaps only natural that apostasy became rampant.
Whole Elenic villages in Zemoch were converted to Styric
pantheism. Temples were openly erected in honour of this
or that topical God, and the darker Styric cults flourished.
Intermarriage between Elene and Styric became common,
and by the end of the first millennium, Zemoch could no
longer have been considered in any light to be a true Elenic
nation. The centuries and the close contact with the Styrics
had even so far corrupted the Elenic language in Zemoch
that it was scarcely intelligible to western Elenes.
It was in the eleventh century that a youthful goatherd
in the mountain village of Ganda in central Zemoch had