"Phyllis Eisenstein - Island In Lake" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eisenstein Phyllis)

PHYLLIS EISENSTEIN

THE ISLAND IN THE LAKE

LONG AGO, IN THE MORNING of time, the people lived in a warm and green place,
where the sun had cared for them since first they opened their eyes. And life
was sweet in that place, in the care of that good and generous sun. But the
people were wanderers in their hearts, and at last they turned their backs on
that green place, and on that good sun, and set out into the Great Night to find
another home.

Their journey was long, for the darkness was vast, and homelands were as tiny
and lost in it as flowers on the grassy plain. But the Pole Star had looked upon
them in that darkness, and finding them worthy, he claimed them for his own, and
guided them safe to this sun and this place. Yet when they came to their new
home, it was not a land such as they had known before. No, it was a land strange
and beautiful, a land where magic grew in every meadow, and flowed in every
river, and breathed in the very wind. And foolishly, they destroyed that magic,
and made the land over in the image of their old home, which they had left so
far behind in the Great Night. And they were happy in their new home, not
understanding what they had done.

But the Pole Star, who loved them in spite of their folly, preserved that magic
in a few hidden places, and laid a net of his own power over land and sea, that
the magic might be protected and perpetuated, forever living. And the Pole Star
gave the knowledge of that magic to those who chose to dwell in his own favored
domain, to hold and to use to ease their hardships. For they are wanderers, as
the people were once wanderers every one, and the Pole Star has claimed them
before all others. And the sign of that gift is the promise of the sun--that no
matter how great the night grows, there will always be a dawn.
--Song of the World's Beginning
(among the People of the North)

Alaric the minstrel paused at the crest of the hill. To his left and right, a
line of hills stretched as far as the eye could see, but before him, to the
west, the land sloped downward gently to a broad, flat plain. Upon that plain
lay an irregular grid of ocher fields, their grain all reaped, only the yellow
stubble of barley, wheat, and oats left to dry in the last warm days of the
year. The two dozen dwellings of the peasants who worked those fields were
clustered together into a village near the center of that grid, Alaric could
just make out their stone walls and thatched roofs, and the stone fences of the
animal pens that flanked them. Farther on, much too far from the village to be a
comfortable walk for fetching water, was the lake, shining like burnished silver
under the autumn sun. The Lake of Death.

The day had been hot, even so late in the year, and Alaric was stripped to the
waist, his face shaded by the wide-brimmed hat he had plaited from the sparse
wayside grass. Slung over one shoulder was his knapsack, with only a cloak and a
shirt and some scraps of bread inside; over the other was his lute, the
minstrel's boon companion. The strange and magical north lay far behind him--the