"Flint, Kenneth C - Gods of Eire 01 - The Riders of the Sidhe UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Kenneth C)

"Taiilta," he said, concerned now for her. "I didn't think of you. Are you afraid?"

"It's not fear that's made my sorrow. It's regret for you," she replied evenly, her rigid control re-established. "Lugh, you will not be fighting here. You must run. .. and quickly!"

"Run from this?" he asked, struggling to understand. "You'll need every man..."

She seized his shoulders in a tight grip.

"Listen! Listen to me! I know what we're facing here. There's nothing we can do to hold these men for long. You have to get away!"

"But, what about the rest of you?"

"The rest, all of us, are here only to protect you. All of these years, our only purpose has been to keep you safe!"

"Why?" he asked again, more urgently. Things were happening so fast he couldn't think. There were too many questions.

"I cannot tell you. And there is no more time for talk. You only need to know that we have one aim here ... to keep you alive. You must believe me and you must leave! If you don't, our lives here have been meaningless."

A sudden, burning wind blasted through the open windows of the hall. The force of it rocked the entire building. The roar of it deafened them like the combined fury of a score of gales.

Taiilta and Lugh recovered from the shock and ran to the windows whose shutters had been torn away by the power of the blast. Below them the thick outer wall of the fortress was torn open, gaping like a jagged wound. The rubble of the massive stones was scattered about the inner court. Half the men of the companies were scattered too, killed or wounded by debris, stunned by the blast, buried in piles of splintered rock. The rest were trying gallantly to reform before a stream of heavily armed warriors already pouring through the opening.

"How could they tear down the wall so quickly?' Lugh asked, astounded by the force evidenced below. 'And who are those warriors?" There was something about them that stirred vague, unsettling memories in him.

But Taiilta gave him no chance to think.

THE SEA GOD 7

"There's no more time!" she cried, seizing his arm. "Come

with me!"

She dragged him from the hall and then ran ahead, urging him on. Uncertainly he followed her out of the keep and onto the upper parapet of the walls. Below them the attackers were flooding into the fortress grounds. The two passed defenders who were hurling spears and fragments of broken wall down on the advancing grey-clad soldiers.

By one section of the outer wall Lugh and Taiilta stopped. Not far ahead their warriors held a stairway against the enemy swarming upward from the breached section. They were determined, sacrificing themselves valiantly to keep back the overwhelming numbers below, but they couldnt

hold long.

Taiilta turned a rusted torch socket in the outer wall and pressed inward on a massive stone. It swung back, revealing a staircase spiraling down, through the thickness of the wall.

"This passage leads down to a sheltered cove beyond the point!" she shouted to him above the battle's din. "A boat is hidden there. Take it and sail away. You should be unseen. Go east to Manannan's Isle. You'll find help there!"

He listened to her words in disbelief.

"You really believe I can run away from this? Leave my friends? Leave you, my aunt? My only family?"

"Lugh, I am no aunt to you," she told him. "You are not one of us. I am the daughter of Mac-Erc, the last great High-King of our tribe. Long ago we vowed to protect you, and I have been your foster mother ever since."

He couldn't grasp what she was telling him. This last assault on his sense of reality had dazed him. He shook his head and held on doggedly to the only truth that he did know.