"Esther M. Friesner - Sphynxes Wild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

hollow between the ribs when he arched his backтАФa habit he had picked up from her. The
small tightnesses of sleep banished, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up.
The silken sheet became a makeshift himation.
She had roamed enough. It was time to call her home.
Outside the motel, cars and buses sped past on the highway. The sun was still low in
the eastern sky, and the early-morning freshness lingered. Every breath he took filled his
lungs with the familiar salt smell of the sea, filled his heart with the same eternal regrets
for how debased and adulterated that oldest memory had become. The smell of this ocean
was more waste than water. All of the promise had gone out of it. He knew the true scent
of the tides, and all their secrets; this was a sad parody of that. Oh, he knew! He had been
born at Cumae, where the famed sibyl dwelled. The smell of his mother's milk was
inextricably blended with the indescribable perfumes of the sea and of sorcery, each
powerful, each beautiful.
The sea spoke in riddles, and the sibyl's answers were enigmas for every petitioner to
untangle for himself. He had been bred to the business of interpreting puzzles, reading
plain truth out of other men's mysteries. The sibyl herself had foretold his fate:
Thou, Vergilius, on an alien shore, as immortal as thy choice shall make thee. Master
of all answers, master of none and one, ever to seek it until it may find thee. The riddle
bound shall bind thee, the riddle loosed shall free thee, the riddle answered make or
unmake thee.
Something like a movie marquee hung from the same aqua-and-silver pylon that
supported the derelict motel's neon sign and its Vacancy/No Vacancy shingle. It was
years since the stylized pink conch shell had been illuminated, or the red-and-yellow
Sea-Side Inn.
"Marsh-Side Inn, more like it," the wizard said to himself, leaning against the pylon
and shielding his eyes from the sun. Across the highway, the reeds and wetland grasses
grew tall and dusty gold, the waters of the Thorofare shimmered. The motorists never
seemed to notice that wild beauty any more than they did the lone man wrapped in white
and silence. They had no time, and their sights were distracted by another goal.
"You are right, my pet," Vergilius said to the sea breezes. "We men are blind enough
without the need to claim our own eyes in sacrifice."
He looked beyond the reeds and the water, seeking to read the answer to the riddle of
the unseeing travelers. It was easy enough, though his powers had never been very
strong in taking the omens. But here there was no need to consult birdflight, or the
steaming entrails of a sacrifice. The answer towered clean and golden and silvery on the
island beyond the marshes. It sparkled by day and shone by night with a multicolored
glow so bright that one could almost hear the music that played on that strange shore.
"To hear with our eyesтАж such magic," the sorcerer mused. Sweet music, the clink of
coin. Powerful music, that had lured the wizard's companion to this spot and made her
content to remain here so long. Music easily mastered, for those creatures who lived
outside the laws of chance and were proud to think that they could lose no mortal game.
 "But you did lose," the wizard murmured. "Outplayed at your own game by an
ordinary boy. But was it game or gamble? Did you never suspect that in all the world,
someone might come to you with the answer? Did you always hold us in such scorn? Well,
we have taught you a different lesson, that swole-foot youth and I."
The sorcerer spread the white silk sheet to the wind, and a seagull soared over the
highway, the wetlands, the water, circling, seekingтАж
From on high, she was ridiculously easy to spot. But then, hide and seek was not the
game she preferred. She lay curled up for sleep in a nest of plume grass. The seagull alit
on a nearby hummock of fairly dry ground and watched the slow, regular rise and fall of