"Stephen Lawhead - Pendragon Cycle 02 - Merlin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lawhead Stephen)

See, here are the white-blossomed apple groves, the salt marshes and mirror-smooth lake below the
looming Tor, the white-washed shrine on the nearby hill. And there is the Fisher King himself: dark and
heavy-browed like a summer thunderstorm, stretched on his pallet of red silk, Avallach was a fearful
figure to a child of three, though kind as the heart within him would allow.

And here is my mother, Charis, tall and slim, of such regal bearing as to shame all pretenders, and
possessing a grace that surpasses mere beauty. Golden-haired Daughter of Lieu-Sun, Lady of the Lake,
Mistress of Avallon, Queen of the Faery тАФ her names and titles, like my own, proliferate with time тАФ all
these and more men call her, and they are not wrong.

I was, I knew, the sole treasure of my mother's life; she was never at any pains to disguise the fact.
Good Dafyd, the priest, gave me to know that I was a beloved child of the Living God, and his stories
about God's Son, Jesu, kindled my soul with an early longing for paradise just as Hafgan, Chief Druid,
wise and true, faithful servant in his own way, taught me the taste of knowledge, awakening a hunger I
have never satisfied.

If there was want in the world, I knew nothing of it. Neither did I know fear or danger. The days of my
childhood were blessed with peace and plenty. On Ynys Avallach, at least, time and the events of the
wider world stood off, remote; trouble was heard merely as a muted distant murmur тАФ soft like the
wailing of thebhean sidhe , the Little Dark People, the Hill Folk, in the stone circles on the far hilltops;
distant as the roar of a winter storm cresting mighty Yr Widdfa in the rockbound north.

Trouble there was, make no mistake. But in those sun-sweet days of my earliest remembrance we lived
as the gods of an older time: aloof and unconcerned with the squabbles of the lesser beings around us.
We were the Fair Folk, enchanted presences from the Westerlands living on the Glass Isle. Those who
shared our waterworld of marsh and lake held us in. great esteem and greater dread.

This had its uses. It served to keep strangers at a safe distance. We were not strong in the ways men
respect strength, so the web of tales that grew around us served where force of arms did not.

If that sounds to you, in the age of reason and power, a weak, ineffectual thing, I tell you it was not. In
that age, men's lives were hedged about with beliefs old as fear itself, and those beliefs were not easily
altered, nor less easily abandoned.

Ah, but look! Here is Avallach standing before me on a dew-spangled morning, hand pressed to his side
in his habitual gesture, smiling through his black beard as he would always smile when he saw me, saying,
'Come, little Hawk, the fish are calling тАФ they are unhappy. Let us take the boat and see if we might
liberate a few of them.'

And, hand-in-hand, we go down the path to the lake to fish, Avallach working the oar, little Merlin
holding tight to the gunwale with both small hands. Avallach sings, he laughs, he tells me sad stories of
Lost Atlantis and I listen as only a child can listen, with the whole of my heart.
 The sun climbs high over the lake, and I look back towards the reedy shore and there is my mother,
waiting for me. When I look she waves and calls us back, and Avallach turns the boat and rows to meet
her and we return to the palace. Although she never speaks of it, I know that she grows uneasy when I
am too long from her sight.

I did not know the reason for it then; I know it now.

But life to a child of three is a heady daze of pleasures spinning through a universe too impossibly rich to