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

playmates, liking to know and do what they knew not and could not.
He sat still while his aunt bound back her un-combed hair, and knotted
the belt of her dress, and sat crosslegged throwing handfuls of leaves into
the firepit so that a smoke spread and filled the darkness of the hut. She
began to sing, Her voice changed sometimes to low or high as if another voice
sang through her, and the singing went on and on until the boy did not know if
he waked or slept, and all the while the witch's old black dog that never
barked sat by him with eyes red from the smoke. Then the witch spoke to Duny
in a tongue he did not understand, and made him say with her certain rhymes
and words until the enchantment came on him and held him still.
"Speak!" she said to test the spell.
The boy Could not speak, but he laughed.
Then his aunt was a little afraid of his strength, for this was as
strong a spell as she knew how to weave: she had tried not only to gain
control of his speech and silence, but to bind him at the same time to her
service in the craft of sorcery. Yet even as the spell bound him, he had
laughed. She said nothing. She threw clear water on the fire till the smoke
cleared away, and gave the boy water to drink, and when the air was clear and
he could speak again she taught him the true name of the falcon, to which the
falcon must come.
 This was Duny's first step on the way he was to follow all his life, the
way of magery, the way that led him at last to hunt a shadow over land and sea
to the lightless coasts of death's kingdom. But in those first steps along the
way, it seemed a broad, bright road.
When he found that the wild falcons stooped down to him from the wind
when he summoned them by name, lighting with a thunder of wings on his wrist
like the hunting-birds of a prince, then he hungered to know more such names
and came to his aunt begging to learn the name of the sparrowhawk and the
osprey and the eagle. To earn the words of power he did all the witch asked of
him and learned of her all she taught, though not all of it was pleasant to do
or know. There is a saying on Gont, Weak as woman's magic, and there is
another saying, Wicked as woman's magic. Now the witch of Ten Alders was no
black sorceress, nor did she ever meddle with the high arts or traffic with
Old Powers; but being an ignorant woman among ignorant folk, she often used
her crafts to foolish and dubious ends. She knew nothing of the Balance and
the Pattern which the true wizard knows and serves, and which keep him from
using his spells unless real need demands. She had a spell for every
circumstance, and was forever wearing charms. Much of her lore was mere
rubbish and humbug, nor did she know the true spells from the false. She knew
many curses, and was better at causing sickness, perhaps, than at curing it.
Like any village witch she could brew up a love-potion, but there were other,
uglier brews she made to serve men's jealousy and hate. Such practices,
however, she kept from her young prentice, and as far as she was able she
taught him honest craft.
At first all his pleasure in the art-magic was, childlike, the power it
gave him over bird and beast, and the knowledge of these. And indeed that
pleasure stayed with him all his life. Seeing him in the high pastures often
with a bird of prey about him, the other children called him Sparrowhawk, and
so he came by the name that he kept in later life as his use-name, when his
true-name was not known.