"Fancher, Jane - Rings 1 - Ring Of Lightning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fancher Jane S)

Excerpt from Darius' History of Rhomatum
Reconsidered, by Berul dunSegri, written and published in
the year 284 after the Founding and found in the private
library of Nikaenor Rhomandi dunMheric, 18th
Princeps of Rhomatum.
. . . It is frankly naive to accept any written history as abso-
lute fact, as all events are filtered at least once through the
eyes of the participants and again through the eyes of the
recorder. Even if the recorder and participant are one and
the same, written history remains a record twice removed
from fact, as one must always interpret one's experiences in
retrospect, and one is never quite the same before or after
the interpretation, much less the events themselves.
With regard to the history of Rhomatum, this limitation is
particularly evident in the decades surrounding the Founda-
tion. We have a paucity of documentary evidence regarding
thepresumablydecades of events and thoughts that led
to the Darian Exodus from the ancient city of Mauritum
and the founding of our own fair city. This dearth of knowl-
edge may be partly attributed to the inevitable attrition of
sources over three centuries and the likelihood that the most
interesting sources remain in Mauritum, inaccessible to this
conscientious scholar. Yet these are not the only reasons for
our ignorance, nor are they the greatest. Darius Rhomandi
himself, our city's founder, must be judged the architect of
our ignorance.
By his own decrees, in the thirty-third year after the
Founding, Darius severed his creation from the city which
had created him. With a single stroke of his pen, our
Founder proclaimed his own recounting of the Founding
and his own memories of Mauritum, which he'd set forth in
lus three-volume History of Rhomatum were all the past
Rhomatum needed for the future. All other substantial evi-
dence of Mauritum was henceforth banned in Rhomatum.
Books were burntnot just the tomes of interpretive his-
tory Rhomatum's first settlers transported into Rhomatum
along with their other baggage, but letters, private diaries,
and all the other intimate documents of people in their own
time, without which the conscientious historian is reduced
to evidence scarce removed from rumormongering, hearsay,
and gossip.
Having excised their Mauritumin past from Rhomatum's
collective consciousness, our Founder then signed the second
decree of the Reformation, thereby sealing his city's fate of
isolationist ignorance.
I speak, of course, of the establishment of the Darian cal-
endar which, within the limits of nature (since not even Da-
rius could adjust the speed with which we circle the sun),
divided the year into nine equal months of four equal weeks