"George R. R. Martin - Ice and Fire 2 - A Clash of Kings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

black eyes that meant it was no mere albino, but a truebred white raven of the
Citadel. "Here," he called. The raven spread its wings, leapt into the air,
and flapped noisily across the room to land on the table beside him.
"I'll see to your breakfast now," Pylos announced. Cressen nodded. "This is
the Lady Shireen," he told the raven. The bird bobbed its pale head up and
down, as if it were bowing. "Lady," it croaked. "Lady."
The child's mouth gaped open. "It talks!"
"A few words. As I said, they are clever, these birds."
"Clever bird, clever man, clever clever fool," said Patchface, jangling. "Oh,
clever clever clever fool." He began to sing. "The shadows come to dance, my
lord, dance my lord, dance my lord," he sang, hopping from one foot to the
other and back again. "The shadows come to stay, my lord, stay my lord, stay
my lord. " He jerked his head with each word, the bells in his antlers sending
up a clangor.
The white raven screamed and went flapping away to perch on the iron railing
of the rookery stairs. Shireen seemed to grow smaller. "He sings that all the
time. I told him to stop but he won't. It makes me scared. Make him stop."
And how do I do that? the old man wondered. Once I might have silenced him
forever, but now . . .
Patchface had come to them as a boy. Lord Steffon of cherished memory had
found him in Volantis, across the narrow sea. The king-the old king, Aerys II
Targaryen, who had not been quite so mad in those dayshad sent his lordship to
seek a bride for Prince Rhaegar, who had no sisters to wed. "We have found the
most splendid fool," he wrote Cressen, a fortnight before he was to return
home from his fruitless mission. "Only a boy, yet nimble as a monkey and witty
as a dozen courtiers. He juggles and riddles and does magic, and he can sing
prettily in four tongues. We have bought his freedom and hope to bring him
home with us. Robert will be delighted with him, and perhaps in time he will
even teach Stannis how to laugh."
It saddened Cressen to remember that letter. No one had ever taught Stannis
how to laugh, least of all the boy Patchface. The storm came up suddenly,
howling, and Shipbreaker Bay proved the truth of its name. The lord's two-
masted galley Windproud broke up within sight of his castle. From its parapets
his two eldest sons had watched as their father's ship was smashed against the
rocks and swallowed by the waters. A hundred oarsmen and sailors went down
with Lord Steffon Baratheon and his lady wife, and for days thereafter every
tide left a fresh crop of swollen corpses on the strand below Storm's End.
The boy washed up on the third day. Maester Cressen had come down with the
rest, to help put names to the dead. When they found the fool he was naked,
his skin white and wrinkled and powdered with wet sand. Cressen had thought
him another corpse, but when Jornmy grabbed his ankles to drag him off to the
burial wagon, the boy coughed water and sat up. To his dying day, Jornmy had
sworn that Patchface's flesh was clammy cold.
No one ever explained those two days the fool had been lost in the sea. The
fisherfolk liked to say a mermaid had taught him to breathe water in return
for his seed. Patchface himself had said nothing. The witty, clever lad that
Lord Steffon had written of never reached Storm's End; the boy they found was
someone else, broken in body and mind, hardly capable of speech, much less of
wit. Yet his fool's face left no doubt of who he was. It was the fashion in
the Free City of Volantis to tattoo the faces of slaves and servants; from