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

of nine days. To those seven (and sometimes eight) embar-
rassingly inescapable intercalary days, he assigned the sole
state-sanctioned holiday, the now notorious Transition Day
Festival.
In his ongoing attempts to salvage our collective con-
sciousness from the "insidious effects of unconscious aggran-
dizement," Darius declared those months and days be
named not for forgotten kings, like Mauritum's fourteen un-
equal months; nor ancient gods like the eight days of Mauri-
tum's week; but numbered, simply and rationally, beginning
with the day Darius himself set the rings of Rhomatum
into motion.
Today is the third day of the second week of the seventh
month of the 283rd year after the Founding. But what day
is it in Mauritum? I do not know. No one in Rhomatum
doeslest he admit illegal commerce with our ancestral city.
Oh, Darius! The good you did for your children and your
children's children when you set the clocks and calendars of
Rhomatum running on their own time was a curse upon
historiansas well you knew it would be! From the lands
beyond our own ley-determined borders we have a plenitude
of tales, nothing more. No kernels of dates or documents
which a conscientious historian might plant and nurture into
a hedge linking the here and now of Rhomatum to the there
and then of Mauritum.
Yet I, Berul dunSegri, shall try to piece together some
understanding ofMauritum's ancient pastand by painstak-
ing extraction, some notion of how the Rhomatum I know
and love came to be.
. . . [We] know Mauritum's ring legacy goes back a thou-
sand years and more, and Rhomatum's a mere three hun-
dred. This simple fact would indicate that we did indeed
originate, physically, culturally, and technologically, from
Mauritum. While this might seem obvious, one must remem-
ber that Darius controls our knowledge, and so our ability
to logically extrapolate from a given set of information. Real-
izing where our beliefs originate helps us to examine their
inherent reliability.
. . . [The island off Maurislan in general, and the city of
Mauritum in particular, was, by all available evidence, the
birthplace of the leythium ring disciplines around which
Rhomatum society is structured. While we've no reason to
presume the leylines and nodes which provide the basis for
those disciplines are unique to our small corner of the conti-
nent, elsewhere in the civilized world, people appear to have
either ignored, rejected, or never discovered the advantages
of ley energy.
Elsewhere, people live much as the hill-folk and the
between-ley farmers, in towns and villages and individual
homesteads, dependent upon candles for light and fire for