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

great glacial waste, the lodestone mountains, the witchcraft of a woman who read
men's souls and of her elixir that healed the dying and could even raise the
dead. Lately, he had moved through less exotic lands, through arid hills cloaked
in scrub, their infrequent streams shallow and meandering over pebbly beds,
their scattered inhabitants scrabbling to draw a living from the parched soil.
Yet in those lands he had heard again and again of a bountiful plain beside a
mirror-bright lake, a place where a strong lord ruled and enemies had never
conquered. A place where the people used water from that lake as their
weapon--water that killed what it touched.

The first time he heard the tale, Alaric knew that a minstrel whose stock in
trade was legend and wonders would be a fool to pass it by.

He could have reached it earlier in the year. He could have used his witch's
power to leap from horizon to horizon, from village to village, tracking the
place down in a matter of days. But he had walked instead, as an ordinary man
would walk, because this was the south, where the cry of witch made folk strike
out at what they feared. And he had walked, too, because he was in no great
hurry to see what lay beyond the next hill as long as there were listeners for
his songs before it. Barely nineteen summers old, he had lost everything in his
life, or abandoned it, and now nothing called him to one place over another.
Nothing but curiosity.

The track he followed to the hilltop had been broad and rutted, but overgrown,
as if little used in recent times. As it descended among the fields, though, it
became a real road, cleared of weeds and graded smooth. It led directly to the
village and on past, to the lake shore, where it became a stone causeway linking
that shore with an island in the very center of the water. The island was a
small one, and occupied entirely by a single building, a high-walled fortress
with pennons flying from its many turrets--the fortress of the lord of the Lake
of Death.

Alaric had not even reached the village when he saw two stocky, middle-aged men
and a boy of nine or ten walking toward him. They were dark-haired and
sun-browned, dressed in sleeveless gray tunics and breeches, and they strode
fearlessly toward the stranger. Before they were near enough to ask his
business, he halted, doffed his plaited hat, and bowed low. The lute slid from
his shoulder, and he caught it with one curled arm and strummed a chord as he
held it against his bare chest.

"Greetings, good sirs!" he called. "Alaric the minstrel, at your service with
songs for every mood and every season!"

They halted a few steps away, and the men smiled, but the boy just stared at the
lute, wide-eyed, as if it were some unknown animal.

"A long time since a minstrel came this way," said the shorter of the men; he
had the guttural accent Alaric had become accustomed to in these western lands.
He laid an arm across the boy's shoulders. "Not since before my son was born."