"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Visionary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

and eyes and forehead until it sank in and became part of me, and I pushed myself back into the boulder
until it became part of my legs and body. Then I stood there, very stiff and heavy and hard, but I could
walk, and I could see and hear, now that the dark glass was not over my ears and eyes but was part of
them. I saw that the house was all on fire, burning and smoldering, floor, walls, and roof. A black bird, a
crow, was flying in the smoke from one room to the next. The old woman was burning, her clothes and
flesh and hair smoldering. The crow flew around her and cried to me, "Sister, get out, you'd better get
out!"
There is nothing but anger in the house of anger. I said, "No!"
The crow cawed, saying, "Sister, fetch water, water of the spring!" Then it flew out through the
burning wall of the house. Just as it went, it looked back at me with a man's face, beautiful and strong,
with curly, fiery hair streaming upward. Then the walls of fire sank down into the walls of the Serpentine
heyimas where I was sitting drumming on the three-note drum. I was still drumming, but a different
pattern, a new one.
After that vision, I was called Flicker; the scholars agreed that it's best to use the name that that
Grandmother gives you, even if you don't do what she says. After that vision, I went up to the Springs of
the River, as Crow had said to do; and after it I was freed from my fear of my desire.
The central vision is central; it is not for anything outside itself; indeed there is nothing outside it.
What I beheld in the Ninth House is, as a cloud or a mountain is. We make use of such visions, make
meanings out of them, find images in them, live on them, but they are not for us or about us any more

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than the world is. We are part of them. There are other kinds of vision, all farther from the center and
nearer to the mortal self; one of those is the turning vision, which is about a person's own life. The vision
in which that Grandmother named me was a turning vision.
The Summer came, and the people came down from Chukulmas. My brother of the Serpentine did not
ride his roan horse in the races; a girl of the Obsidian of Chukulmas rode that horse, and he rode a sorrel
mare. The roan stallion won all races and was much praised. After that summer he would race no more,
but be put to stud, they said. I did not ride, but watched the races and the games. It is hard to say how I
felt. My throat ached all the time, and I kept saying silentiy inside myself, goodbye, goodbye! But what I
was saying goodbye to was already gone. I was mourning and yet unmoved. The girl was a good rider,
and beautiful, and I thought maybe they are going to come inland together; but it did not hurt or concern
me. What I wanted was to be gone from Telina, to begin living the life that followed the turning vision,
that followed the gyre.
So in the heat of the summertime I went with Tarweed upriver, to the Springs of the River at
Wakwaha.
On the Mountain I lived in the host-house of the Serpentine, and worked mostly as electrician's
assistant at odd jobs around the sacred buildings and the Archive and Exchange. In the morning I would
come outdoors at sunrise. All beyond and below the porch of that house I would see a vast pluming
blankness, the summer fog filling the Valley, while the first rays of the sun brightened the rocks of the
Mountain's peaks above me, and I would sing as I had been taught:

"It is the Valley of the puma,
where the lion walks,
where the lion wakes,
shining, shining in the Seventh House!"

Later, in the rainy season, the puma walked on the Mountain itself, darkening the summits and the
Springs in cloud and gray mist. To wake in the silence of that rainless, all-concealing fog was to wake to