"LeGuin-Olders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

URSULA K. Le GUIN

OLDERS

The moon slips and shines in the wrinkled mirror before the prow, and from the
northern sky the Bright Companions shoot glancing arrows of light along the
water. In the stern of the boat the polesman stands in the watchful solemnity of
his task. His movements as he poles and steers the boat are slow, certain,
august. The long, low channelboat slides on the black water as silently as the
reflection it pursues. A few dark figures huddle in it. One dark figure lies
full length on the half deck, arms at his sides, closed eyes unseeing that other
moon slipping and shining through wisps of fog in the luminous blue night sky.
The Husbandman of Sandry is coming home from war.

They had been waiting for him on Sandry Island ever since last spring, when he
went with seven men, following the messengers who came to raise the Queen's
army. In midsummer Four of the men of Sandry brought back the news that he was
wounded and was lying in the care of the Queen's own physician. They told of his
great valor in battle, and told of their own prowess too, and how they had won
the war. Since then there had been no news.

With him now in the channelboat were the three companions who had stayed with
him, and a physician sent by the Queen, an, assistant to her own doctor. This
man, an active, slender person in his forties, cramped by the long night's
travel, was quick to leap ashore when the boat slid silently up along the stone
quay of Sandry Farm.

While the boatmen and the others busied themselves making the boat fast and
lifting the stretcher and its burden up from the boat to the quay, the doctor
went on up to the house. Approaching the island, as the sky imperceptibly
lightened from night-blue to colorless pallor, he had seen the spires of
windmills, the crowns of trees, and the roofs of the house, all in black
silhouette, standing very high after the miles of endlessly level reedbeds and
water channels. "Hello, the people!" he called out as he entered the courtyard.
"Wake up! Sandry has come home!"

The kitchen was astir already. Lights sprang up elsewhere in the big house. The
doctor heard voices, doors. A stableboy came vaulting out of the loft where he
had slept, a dog barked and barked its tardy warning, people began to come out
of the house door. As the stretcher was borne into the courtyard, the Farmwife
came hurrying out, wrapped in a green cloak that hid her night dress, her hair
loose, her feet bare on the stones. She ran to the stretcher as they set it
down. "Farre, Farre," she said, kneeling, bending over the still figure. No one
spoke or moved in that moment. "He is dead," she said in a whisper, drawing
back.

"He is alive," the doctor said. And the oldest of the litterbearers, Pask the
saddler, said in his rumbling bass, "He lives, Makalidem. But the wound was