"MacLeod, Ian R - Sealight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

first. Wealth and idleness had corrupted the vigor that sent my forefathers to
sea."

Her voice had lost some of its icy calm.. She began to pace to and fro. Ran
heard the gentle sigh of silk against flesh, the pad of footsteps on stone.
"Before I was born, my mother employed an ancient hag who was skilled in the
arts that women use to make themselves look comely. The hag was a whispering bag
of bones who lived in a hut on the marsh flats and survived by scouring the
shore drift and seaweed for dead fish and maybe the occasional jewel or relic
washed up from some forgotten wreck . . . hardly an advert for her trade, but
then I have heard it said that the best magician is often the least likely one.
My mother's hair was dark of course, as is my own, as is the hair of most women
in this city probably to this day. But she wanted to be blonde, and the hag gave
her a potion. It worked, in a way. It made her hair blonde, but made it all fall
out. . . .

"You might smile, Ran Kirving, but you must understand that to a woman of court,
this was as the loss of gallantry might be to a knight . . . or so at least it
seemed to my mother. She had the hag convicted under some statue about the
Description of Trades. And she came to watch the beheading. Before the axe was
raised, the trembling creature saw her sitting amid the nobility in the most
expensive seats. With the presence of death at her shoulder the hag also sensed
that my mother was with child. She screamed a curse across the heads of the
crowd, one of the strangest curses in this city of strange curses. The hag said
that my mother would bear the most beautiful child in the Known World.

"It came to pass. I was born beautiful beyond imagining. For his own reasons, my
father doubted the tale of the curse. One look in the mirror told him that I was
not his child. As I grew, the thought became an agony to him, until he murdered
my mother in a fit of rage and then threw himself from this tower. I found half
of him next morning on my balcony. He had struck the sharp railings as he fell.
The other half lay amid the scattered petals of a rose garden far below.

"It was the first of many tragedies that were to blight my life. You must
realize, Ran, that I was truly young then, that I had the same hopes and fears
as any other girl approaching womanhood. But women who thought themselves
beautiful despoiled their looks with acid rather than accept the flaws that my
face threw at them like a mirror flashing in the sun. Others simply ended their
lives. Of course, there were many who wished to kill me, but the attempts always
ended in bizarre tragedy. The wet nurse who had been my friend and companion
from birth was poisoned by a draft intended for me. Children were drowned on a
barge on which I was to have traveled.

"Men, of course, all longed to gain my favors. There were duels and suicides,
endless reams of turgid poetry. I longed for companionship, love. But people
grew pale and trembled in my presence, and I soon found that those who disguised
their feelings and reigned simple friendship were not to be trusted. I began to
realize that beauty is power, and that like all power it brings everything but
that which you desire. Increasingly, I became a recluse, counting the bright
years of youth by the sealight that passed across the inner walls of Torea.