"Ursula K. LeGuin - Earthsea 3 - The Farthest Shore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

short, for the stuff is poison. First there is a trembling, and later paralysis, and then death."
Arren looked at a woman sitting with her back to a sunwarmed wall; she had raised her hand
as if to brush away the flies from her face, but the hand made a jerky, circular motion in the
air, as if she had quite forgotten about it and it was moved only by the repeated surging of a
palsy or shaking in the muscles. The gesture was like an incantation emptied of all intention, a
spell without meaning.
Hawk was looking at her too, expressionless. "Come on!" he said.
He led on across the marketplace to an awning-shaded booth. Stripes of sunlight colored
green, orange, lemon, crimson, azure, fell across the cloths and shawls and woven belts displayed,
and danced multitudinous in the tiny mirrors that bedecked the high, feathered headdress of the
woman who sold the stuff. She was big and she chanted in a big voice, "Silks, satins, canvases,
furs, felts, woollens, fleecefells of Gont, gauzes of Sowl, silks of Lorbanery! Hey, you Northern
men, take off your duffle-coats; don't you see the sun's out? How's this to take home to a girl in
far Havnor? Look at it, silk of the South, fine as the mayfly's wing!" She had flipped open with
deft hands a bolt of gauzy silk, pink shot with threads of silver.
"Nay, mistress, we're not wed to queens," said Hawk, and the woman's voice rose to a
blare: "So what do you dress your womenfolk in, burlap? sailcloth? Misers that won't buy a bit of
silk for a poor woman freezing in the everlasting Northern snow! How's this then, a Gontish
fleecefell, to help you keep her warm on winter nights!" She flung out over the counterboard a
great cream and brown square, woven of the silky hair of the goats of the northeastern isles. The
pretended trader put out his hand and felt it, and he smiled.
"Aye, you're a Gontishman?" said the blaring voice, and the headdress nodding sent a
thousand colored dots spinning over the canopy and the cloth.
"This is Andradean work; see? There's but four warpstrings to the finger's width. Gont
uses six or more. But tell me why you've turned from working magic to selling fripperies. When I
was here years since, I saw you pulling flames out of men's ears, and then you made the flames
turn into birds and golden bells, and that was a finer trade than this one."
"It was no trade at all," the big woman said, and for a moment Arren was aware of her
eyes, hard and steady as agates, looking at him and Hawk from out of the glitter and restlessness
of her nodding feathers and flashing mirrors.
"It was pretty, that pulling fire out of ears," said Hawk in a dour but simple-minded
tone. "I thought to show it to my nevvy."
"Well now, look you," said the woman less harshly, leaning her broad, brown arms and heavy
bosom on the counter. "We don't do those tricks any more. People don't want 'em. They've seen
through 'em. These mirrors now, I see you remember my mirrors," and she tossed her head so that
the reflected dots of colored light whirled dizzily about them. "Well, you can puzzle a man's mind
with the flashing of the Mirrors and with words and with other tricks I won't tell you, till he
thinks he sees what he don't see, what isn't there. Like the flames and golden bells, or the S't
of clothes I used to deck sailormen in, cloth of
In s gold with diamonds like apricots, and off they'd swagger like the King of All the Isles ....
But it was tricks, fooleries. You can fool men. They're like chickens charmed by a snake, by a
finger held before 'em. Men are like chickens. But then in the end they know they've been fooled
and fuddled and they get angry and lose their pleasure in such things. So I turned to this trade,
and maybe all the silks aren't silks nor all the fleeces Gontish, but all the same they'll
wearthey'll wearl They're real and not mere lies and air like the suits of cloth of gold."

"Well, well," said Hawk, "then there's none left in all Hort Town to pull fire out of
ears, or do any magic like they did?"
At his last words the woman frowned; she straightened up and began to fold the fleecefell
carefully. "Those who want lies and visions chew hazia," she said. "Talk to them if you like!" She