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

up to High Fall."
The smith stared at his son who stood wraithlike in that weird, dank
mist. It took him a minute to see Duny's meaning, but when he did he ran at
once, noiselessly, knowing every fence and corner of the village, to find the
others and tell them what to do. Now through the grey fog bloomed a blur of
red, as the Kargs set fire to the thatch of a house. Still they did not come
up into the village, but waited at the lower end till the mist should lift and
lay bare their loot and prey.
The tanner, whose house it was that burned, sent a couple of boys
skipping right under the Kargs' noses, taunting and yelling and vanishing
again like smoke into smoke. Meantime the older men, creeping behind fences
and running from house to house, came close on the other side and sent a
volley of arrows and spears at the warriors, who stood all in a bunch. One
Karg fell writhing with a spear, still warm from its forging, right through
his body. Others were arrow-bitten, and all enraged. They charged forward then
to hew down their puny attackers, but they found only the fog about them, full
of voices. They followed the voices, stabbing ahead into the mist with their
great, plumed, bloodstained lances. Up the length of the street they came
shouting, and never knew they had run right through the village, as the empty
huts and houses loomed and disappeared again in the writhing grey fog. The
villagers ran scattering, most of them keeping well ahead since they knew the
ground; but some, boys or old men, were slow. The Kargs stumbling on them
drove their lances or hacked with their swords, yelling their war-cry, the
names of the White Godbrothers of Atuan:
"Wuluah! Atwah!"
Some of the band stopped when they felt the land grow rough underfoot,
but others pressed right on, seeking the phantom village, following dim
wavering shapes that fled just out of reach before them. All the mist had come
alive with these fleeting forms, dodging, flickering, fading on every side.
One group of the Kargs chased the wraiths straight to the High Fall, the
cliff's edge above the springs of Ar, and the shapes they pursued ran out onto
the air and there vanished in a thinning of the mist, while the pursuers fell
screaming through fog and sudden sunlight a hundred feet sheer to the shallow
pools among the rocks. And those that came behind and did not fall stood at
the cliff's edge, listening.
Now dread came into the Kargs' hearts and they began to seek one
another, not the villagers, in the uncanny mist. They gathered on the
hillside, and yet always there were wraiths and ghost-shapes among them; and
other shapes that ran and stabbed from behind with spear or knife and vanished
again. The Kargs began to run, all of them, downhill, stumbling, silent, until
all at once they ran out from the grey blind mist and saw the river and the
ravines below the village all bare and bright in morning sunlight. Then they
stopped, gathering together, and looked back. A wall of wavering, writhing
grey lay blank across the path, hiding all that lay behind it. Out from it
burst two or three stragglers, lunging and stumbling along, their long lances
rocking on their shoulders. Not one Karg looked back more than that once. All
went down, in haste, away from the enchanted place.
Farther down the Northward Vale those warriors got their fill of
fighting. The towns of the East Forest, from Ovark to the coast, had gathered
their men and sent them against the invaders of Gont. Band after band they