"Ursula K. LeGuin - Earthsea 5 - The Other Wind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

Refreshed by the water, he was able to get ahead of the oxen, and they and the cart and
the carter were a good way behind him when he heard the carter speak again. "Going
to the Old Mages house," he said. If it was a question, it seemed to need no answer.
The traveler walked on.
When he started up the road it had still lain in the vast shadow of the mountain, but
when he turned left to the little village he took to be Re Albi, the sun was blazing in
the western sky and under it the sea lay white as steel.
There were scattered small houses, a small dusty square, a fountain with one thin
stream of water falling. He made for that, drank from his hands again and again, put
his head under the stream, rubbed cool water through his hair and let it run down his
arms, and sat for a while on the stone rim of the fountain, observed in attentive silence
by two dirty little boys and a dirty little girl.
"He ain't the farrier," one of the boys said.
The traveler combed his wet hair back with his ringers.
"He'll be going to the Old Mage's house," said the girl, "stupid."
"Yerraghh!" said the boy, drawing his face into a horrible lopsided grimace by pulling
at it with one hand while he clawed the air with the other.
"You watch it, Stony," said the other boy.
"Take you there," said the girl to the traveler.
"Thanks," he said, and stood up wearily.
"Got no staff, see," said one boy, and the other said, "Never said he did." Both watched
with sullen eyes as the stranger followed the girl out of the village to a path that led
north through rocky pastures that dropped down steep to the left.
The sun glared on the sea. His eyes dazzled, and the high horizon and the blowing
wind made him dizzy. The child was a little hopping shadow ahead of him. He
stopped.
"Come on," she said, but she too stopped. He came up to her on the path. "There," she
said. He saw a wooden house near the cliff's edge, still some way ahead.
"I ain't afraid," the girl said. "I fetch their eggs lots of times for Stony's dad to carry to

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Le Guin, Ursula - [Earthsea 05] The Other Wind

market. Once she gave me peaches. The old lady. Stony says I stole 'em but I never.
Go on. She ain't there. Neither of em is."
She stood still, pointing to the house.
"Nobody's there?"
"The old man is. Old Hawk, he is."
The traveler went on. The child stood watching him till he went round the corner of the
house.
Two goats stared down at the stranger from a steep fenced field. A scatter of hens and
half-grown chicks pecked and conversed softly in long grass under peach and plum
trees. A man was standing on a short ladder against the trunk of one of the trees; his
head was in the leaves, and the traveler could see only his bare brown legs.
"Hello," the traveler said, and after a while said it again a bit louder.
The leaves shook and the man came briskly down the ladder. He carried a handful of
plums, and when he got off the ladder he batted away a couple of bees drawn by the
juice. He came forward, a short, straight-backed man, grey hair tied back from a
handsome, timeworn face. He looked to be seventy or so. Old scars, four white seams,
ran from his left cheekbone down to the jaw. His gaze was clear, direct, intense.