"Morgan Llywelyn - Druids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Llywelyn Morgan)

The adult members of the tribe were privileged to attend all
the sacrifices except those which involved some secret ritual, like
this one. Children, however, were forbidden. But we boys some-
times re-created the sacrifices for ourselves, using some hapless

lizard or rodent.

For the son of a warrior, I was strangely squeamish about see-
ing blood shed. It troubled my belly. I always let someone else
take the role of the sacrificer, and I dropped my eyes at the crucial
moment when the others were watching the knife. I was great at
chanting and exhorting, however.

Now the real chanters and exhorters were at work. Their voices
filled the grove, calling on the sacred names of sun and wind and
water while their feet wove a complex pattern on the earth. Chant-
ing rose to thunder amid me oaks.

Then Menua lifted his arms. Like the bare twigs of the trees,
his fingers clawed space. By his gesture, sound was torn from the
grove, hurled into the air, gone. The other druids halted in mid-
step, freezing the pattern.

The air crackled with gathering magic.

Menua flung back his hood. In me style of the Order, his head
was shaved across the front from ear to ear, leaving a bald dome
of forehead surrounded by a flaring mane of white hair. In sharp
contrast were the black eyebrows that almost met above his nose.
Menua was only of average height for a Gaulish man, but he was
wide and solid, and the voice booming from his chest was the

voice of the oaks.

"Hear us!" he cried to That Which Watched. "See us! Inhale
our breath and know us for a part of you!''

I shrank inside my tunic. My crawling flesh informed me of a
Presence, larger than human, occupying visibly empty space,
aware of Menua and the druids. And of me. A terrible, awesome
power, gathering itself in the grove.

"The seasons are entangled," Menua was saying. "Spring
cannot free itself from winter. Hear us, heed our cries! Your sun
does not heat the earth and soften her womb so she will accept
seed and grow grain. The animals will not mate. Soon we will
have no cows for milk and leather, no sheep for meat and wool.

"The pattern of the weather is damaged. Our bards tell us that