"Ursula K. LeGuin - Earthsea 1 - A Wizard Of Earthsea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

needful for him as a baby, but she had business of her own and once he could
look after himself at all she paid no more heed to him. But one day when the
boy was seven years old, untaught and knowing nothing of the arts and powers
that are in the world, he heard his aunt crying out words to a goat which had
jumped up onto the thatch of a hut and would not come down: but it came
jumping when she cried a certain rhyme to it. Next day herding the longhaired
goats on the meadows of High Fall, Duny shouted to them the words he had
heard, not knowing their use or meaning or what kind of words they were:

Noth hierth malk man
hiolk han merth han!

He yelled the rhyme aloud, and the goats came to him. They came very quickly,
all of them together, mot making any sound. They looked at him out of the dark
slot in their yellow eyes.
Duny laughed and shouted it out again, the rhyme that gave him power
over the goats. They came closer, crowing and pushing round him. All at once
he felt afraid of their thick, ridged horns and their strange eyes and their
strange silence. He tried to get free of them and to run away. The goats ran
with him keeping in a knot around him, and so they came charging down into the
village at last, all the goats going huddled together as if a rope were pulled
tight round them, and the boy in the midst of them weeping and bellowing.
Villagers ran from their houses to swear at the goats and laugh at the boy.
Among them came the boy's aunt, who did not laugh. She said a word to the
goats, and the beasts began to bleat and browse and wander, freed from the
spell.
"Come with me," she said to Deny.
She took him into her hut where she lived alone. She let no child enter
there usually, and the children feared the place. It was low and dusky,
windowless, fragrant with herbs that hung drying from the cross-pole of the
roof, mint and moly and thyme, yarrow and rushwash and paramal, kingsfoil,
clovenfoot, tansy and bay. There his aunt sat crosslegged by the firepit, and
looking sidelong at the boy through the tangles of her black hair she asked
him what he had said to the goats, and if he knew what the rhyme was. When she
found that he knew nothing, and yet had spellbound the goats to come to him
and follow him, then she saw that he must have in him the makings of power.
As her sister's son he had been nothing to her, but now she looked at
him with a new eye. She praised him, and told him she might teach him rhymes
he would like better, such as the word that makes a snail look out of its
shell, or the name that calls a falcon down from the sky.
"Aye, teach me that name!" he said, being clear over the fright the
goats had given him, and puffed up with her praise of his cleverness.
The witch said to him, "You will not ever tell that word to the other
children, if I teach it to you."
"I promise."
She smiled at his ready ignorance. "Well and good. But I will bind your
promise. Your tongue will be stilled until I choose to unbind it, and even
then, though you can speak, you will not be able to speak the word I teach you
where another person can hear it. We must keep the secrets of our craft."
"Good," said the boy, for he had no wish to tell the secret to his