"Fifth Millennium 02 - Shadow's Daughter - Shirley Meier UCb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fifth Millennium)

Chapter One

It was spring in F*talezon, and the Bkitrosh, the Blood-roses, bloomed. The hand-sized blossoms nodded in the breeze over the head of a four-year-old child sitting on die white stone steps in the sunshine, pulling her tunic over her knees. The house was set into the ground, with only the windows, the door and the roof snowing, like most of the other old houses in the Middle Quarter of the city. Her mother called the flowers her sisters because the newly planted bushes had first bloomed on the child's birthday.

Megan Uxandashkya sat with her arms clasped around her knees, knowing she wasn't supposed to pull her tunic so far. She scrunched her knees up high; it wouldn't stretch so much that way. Her father had woven it new. Down the street one of the drover's husbands laughed with the roheji seller as he bought some of her pastries hot out of the oil.

Around the corner she could hear the Old Brewery Gate rumbling open onto Brewer's Street; the horses snorting and stamping, harness jingling as they hauled

2 Shirley Meier

the barrels out. She didn't like horses much, though she didn't mind their smell mixed with the bread-rising smell of the beer.

Downstairs, inside, she could hear her mother singing, her hands flying over the lace-frame like the Veysneya, the Silverwings, in Koru's Temple. They flew in the light of the rose window, and the painted faces of the Goddess, hundreds of years old, gazed down from the smooth-polished rock walls. The Ladyshrine down die street in the park was a tiny shrine compared to the temple, but Megan liked the statue of Koru there much better. Her father would take her there sometimes, holding her hand because she was too little to walk alone and might be lost, or stolen by those whose market was children.

Lixand Mikhailovych, called Weaver, whistled as he opened the yard gate with one hand, balancing a sack of 'marunth flour on one shoulder. He was average height for a Zak, four and a half feet tall, with dark brown hair, and green eyes set in a lightly tanned round face that smiled more easily than it frowned. "Ness! Megan! I'm home ..." He laughed and caught Megan's hand when she ran and hugged his legs. "Come on, bylaskka, little princess, help me put this in the cupboard and come for a walk with me."

Megan would stretch her legs and trot to keep up to her papa whenever they went on these walks, while he told her stories. Mama always said that if he weren't a Gospvzhyn, a Great Master in the Weaver's Guild, he'd be a storyteller. Megan always liked listening, though she didn't always understand.

They walked past the lawyer's house, with its red brick and worn black gargoyles. It leaned and always looked like it wanted to fall on their house, but never did; past the baker's house, that smelled so good, past the drovers' houses and the empty space that had nothing in it but broken, burned stones and grass taller than Megan; past the brewers' houses and the nigh grey wall of the Sysbaet School.

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They were good teachers as well as healers, almost as good as Haians, and she might be able to go to the school and learn to read. Megan wanted to learn, but her parents said that it cost a lot of Dragonclaws and they didn't have time to teach her more, though they tried. She knew her letters already because Papa said that it was a good thing to know. He knew because his family had had enough money for schooling before the Great Fire took most of his family, and Ness had learned from her mother, Grandma-who-was-with-Koru. If you couldn't read, you couldn't be apprenticed in the Guild and would have to be a beggar or a thief.

The cobblestones were old; worn by the tread of generations of people. Because the year had been dry so far the sewer in mid-street was cracking mud and didn't smell, which to Megan's mind was almost as nice as when the fall rains came and washed the mud and odor away. Her papa nodded hello to the neighbors who sat on their front steps or walked along Szyzka Lane.

The bare trees' branches reminded Megan of old people's gap-teeth. The buds were just big enough to make small shadows to step in. She slapped from shadow to shadow, pretending the sunny spaces were the rat pits in the Va Zalstva, the Arena, where she mustn't step or she'd be devoured. Her papa got ahead of her a little and she gave up her game, running to catch up. Even this far down the street she could still hear the vats in the brewery groaning and sidling, like sleeping men snoring.

"Megan, you mustn't let go my hand until you're bigger," Papa said and stroked her Hair back out of her face. 'Bytashka, my little shadow, in a crowd, anyone can get lost. I want you to be careful, even when you walk with

me.

"I will, Papa." She held tight to his hand and walked onto the dusty grass of the park as if she were grown up, instead of running ahead like she wanted to.

The park was a small patch of grass with a few trees along the streets and the stream, and lilacs around the Shrine. Across the park the Sneykh tributary gurgled to

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itself, on its way down to Chas Lake. It was a shallow creek cascading from the Dark Lord's Temple in the northern cliff wail of the City. The Sneykh was usually dirty because the Dark Lord's priests sacrificed into the water. The other stream, die Byeliey, ran out of the Ladyshrine on the south cliff wall, and was carefully kept clean.

"Tell me the best story again, please," Megan said. Papa sat down on one of die wood benches of the shrine and took her on his lap, and Megan hugged him looking over his shoulder at the white fountain with the statue of Koru. She's so beautiful, she thought.

"Szyzka Lane," Papa began, "is a street with Middle Quarter ways of thinking, hanging on to the First Quarter's skirts with its fingernails so it doesn't slide any farther down the rift. It's the sort of street that, every morning, blinks its shutters, looks around, and wonders vaguely where its grandeur has disappeared to overnight. It's the sort of place where quiet people live quiet lives, away from the notice of the Pntfetatla above and the thieves below. We have nothing that either of them wish to steal and when the riots come, we pull in our heads and wait until they're gone. We didn't always have riots, Megan-mi."

"Tell me, Papa." She didn't understand it all, but she Uked sitting on his lap, hugging him when he had time like this, on a rest-day at Hand'send. She loved feeling his big arms around her so she'd be safe and cozy.

"The Zarizan, the Young DragonLord, Ranion, is the only Heir. His father the Dragon, the Woyvode, was harsh, ruthless, the very spirit of Prafetatla before he grew old and weak, but he cared what happened to us, here and in die other lands. The Kievir nearest the young Lord, Dark One notice him, cares for himself and his own zight, or pride, and nothing else. When the Old Dragon fell ill the first time, the Four-days War happened with the Thanes. No protection was offered us, no retaliation for people persecuted. That was when pogrom began along the Thanish borderЧ"

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