"Ursula K. Leguin - League 03 - City of Illusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

The forest people took him in and raised him almost as a child, teaching him to speak,
training him in forest lore, giving him all the knowledge they had. But they could not solve
the riddle of his past, and at last he had to set out on a quest to Es Toch, the City of the
Shing, the Liars of Earth, the Enemy of Mankind.
There he would find out the truth about himselfтАжand a universe of danger.




I

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IMAGINE DARKNESS.
In the darkness that faces outward from the sun a mute spirit woke. Wholly involved in chaos, he knew no
pattern. He had no language, and did not know the darkness to be night.
As unremembered light brightened about him he moved, crawling, running sometimes on all fours,
sometimes pulling himself erect, but not going anywhere. He had no way through the world in which he
was, for a way implies a beginning and an end. All things about him were tangled, all things resisted him.
The confusion of his being was impelled to movement by forces for which he knew no name: terror,
hunger, thirst, pain. Through the dark forest of things he blundered in silence till the night stopped him, a
greater force. But when the light began again he groped on. When he broke out into the sudden broad
sunlight of the Clearing he rose upright and stood a moment. Then he put his hands over his eyes and
cried out aloud.
Weaving at her loom in the sunlit garden, Parth saw him at the forest's edge. She called to the others with
a quick beat of her mind. But she feared nothing, and by the time the others came out of the house she had
gone across the Clearing to the uncouth figure that crouched among the high, ripe grasses. As they
approached they saw her put her hand on his shoulder and bend down to him, speaking softly.
She turned to them with a wondering look, saying, "Do you see his eyesтАж?"
They were strange eyes, surely. The pupil was large; the iris, of a grayed amber color, was oval
lengthwise so that the white of the eye did not show at all. "Like a cat," said Garra. "Like an egg all yolk,"


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 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Ekumen 03 - City of Illusions

said Kai, voicing the slight distaste of uneasiness roused by that small, essential difference. Otherwise the
stranger seemed only a man, under the mud and scratches and filth he had got over his face and naked
body in his aimless struggle through the forest; at most he was a little paler-skinned than the brown
people who now surrounded him, discussing him quietly as he crouched in the sunlight, cowering and
shaking with exhaustion and fear.
Though Parth looked straight into his strange eyes no spark of human recognition met her there. He was
deaf to their speech, and did not understand their gestures.
"Mindless or out of his mind," said Zove. "But also starving; we can remedy that." At this Kai and young
Thurro half led half dragged the shambling fellow into the house. There they and Parth and Buckeye
managed to feed and clean him, and got him onto a pallet, with a shot of sleep-dope in his veins to keep
him there.
"Is he a Shing?" Parth asked her father.
"Are you? Am I? Don't be naive, my dear," Zove answered. "If I could answer that question I could set