"M. John Harrison - Viriconium 2 - A Storm Of Wings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

A Storm of Wings by M. John Harrison
A Storm of Wings ┬й1980 by M.John Harrison
тАв Chapter One

тАв Chapter Two

тАв Chapter Three

тАв Chapter Four

тАв Chapter Five

тАв Chapter Six

тАв Chapter Seven

тАв Chapter Eight

тАв Chapter Nine

тАв Chapter Ten

тАв Chapter Eleven
1: The Moon Looking Down
In the dark tidal reaches of one of those unnamed rivers which spring from the mountains behind Cladich,
on a small domed island in the shallows before the sea, fallen masonry of a great age glows faintly under
the eye of an uncomfortable Moon. A tower once stood here in the shadow of the estuarine cliffs, made
too long ago for anyone to remember, in a way no-one left can understand, from a single obsidian
monolith fully two hundred feet in length. For ten thousand years wind and water scoured its southern
face, finding no weakness; and at night a yellow light might be discerned in its topmost window, coming
and going as if someone there passed before a flame. Who brought it to this rainy country, where in
winter the gales drive the white water up the Minch and fishermen from Lendalfoot shun the inshore
ground, and for what purpose, is unclear. Now it lies in five pieces. The edges of the stone are neither
shattered nor worn, but melted like candlewax. The causeway that once gave access here - from a beach
on the west bank where lumps of volcanic glass are scattered on the sand - is drowned now, and all that
comes up it from the water is a strange lax vegetation, a sprawl of giant sea-hemlock which for some
reason has forsaken the mild and beneficial brine of the estuary to colonise the beach, spread its pale and
pulpy stems over the shattered tower, and clutch at a stand of dead, white pines.

In this time, in the Time of the Locust, when we have nothing to ourselves but the hollowness within us, in
the Time of Bone, when we have nothing to do but wait, nothing human moves here. Nothing human has
moved here for eighty years. Fire, were it brought here, would be pale and dim, hard to kindle. Passion
would fade here on a whisper. Something in the tower's fall has poisoned the air here, and drained the
landscape of its power. White and sickly and infinitely slow, the hemlock creeps out of the water to run
sad rubbery fingers over the rubbish in the fallen rooms. The collapse of the tower seems complete, the
defeat of artifice accomplished.

Yet in the Time of the Locust are we not counselled to patience? Eighty years have passed since
tegeus-Cromis broke the yoke of Canna Moidart, since the Chemosit fell and the Reborn Men came
among us; and in the deeps of this autumn night, under the aegis of an old and bitter geology, we witness