"George R. R. Martin - Ice Dragon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

She did not know when she had first seen it. It seemed to her that it
had always been a part of her life, a vision glimpsed during the deep of
winter, sweeping across the frigid sky on wings serene and blue. Ice dragons
were rare, even in those days, and whenever it was seen the children would all
point and wonder, while the old folks muttered and shook their heads. It was a
sign of a long and bitter winter when ice dragons were abroad in the land. An
ice dragon had been seen flying across the face of the moon on the night Adara
had been born, people said, and each winter since it had been seen again, and
those winters had been very bad indeed, the spring coming later each year. So
the people would set fires and pray and hope to keep the ice dragon away, and
Adara would fill with fear.
But it never worked. Every year the ice dragon returned. Adara knew it
came for her.
The ice dragon was large, half again the size of the scaled green war
dragons that Hal and his fellows flew. Adara had heard legends of wild dragons
larger than mountains, but she had never seen any. Hal's dragon was big
enough, to be sure, five times the size of a horse, but it was small compared
to the ice dragon, and ugly besides.
The ice dragon was a crystalline white, that shade of white that is so
hard and cold that it is almost blue. It was covered with hoarfrost, so when
it moved its skin broke and crackled as the crust on the snow crackles beneath
a man's boots, and flakes of rime fell off.
Its eyes were clear and deep and icy.
Its wings were vast and batlike, colored all a faint translucent blue.
Adara could see the clouds through them, and oftentimes the moon and stars,
when the beast wheeled in frozen circles through the skies.
Its teeth were icicles, a triple row of them, jagged spears of unequal
length, white against its deep blue maw.
When the ice dragon beat its wings, the cold winds blew and the snow
swirled and scurried and the world seemed to shrink and shiver. Sometimes when
a door flew open in the cold of winter, driven by a sudden gust of wind, the
householder would run to bolt it and say, "An ice dragon flies nearby."
And when the ice dragon opened its great mouth, and exhaled, it was not
fire that came streaming out, the burning sulfurous stink of lesser dragons.
The ice dragon breathed _cold_.
Ice formed when it breathed. Warmth fled. Fires guttered and went out,
shriven by the chill. Trees froze through to their slow secret souls, and
their limbs turned brittle and cracked from their own weight. Animals turned
blue and whimpered and died, their eyes bulging and their skin covered over
with frost.
The ice dragon breathed death into the world; death and quiet and
_cold_. But Adara was not afraid. She was a winter child, and the ice dragon
was her secret.
She had seen it in the sky a thousand times. When she was four, she saw
it on the ground.
She was out building on her snow castle, and it came and landed close
to her, in the emptiness of the snow-covered fields. All the ice lizards ran
away. Adara simply stood. The ice dragon looked at her for ten long
heartbeats, before it took to the air again. The wind shrieked around her and
through her as it beat its wings to rise, but Adara felt strangely exulted.