"Alphabet Of Thorn" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

УI trust the depths donТt leak.Ф

УNo.Ф

ФThen IТll sleep happily buried in stone.Ф He wrapped his manuscript again in leather and himself in fur, and followed Nepenthe.

She led him down and down until mortared stone became solid stone, until they left even the green plain above them and the only light came from windows staring across the sea. Until then, he questioned her; she answered absently, wondering about the fish wrapped in his arms.

УYou donТt remember anything of your life before the librarians found you?Ф

УHow could I? I had no teeth; I didnТt know words for anything. I donТt even remember Ч Ф She stopped to light a taper, for the stairways had begun to plunge into hand-hewn burrowings. УI do remember one thing. But I donТt know what it is.Ф

УWhat is it?Ф

She shrugged. УJust a face, I think.Ф

УWhose?Ф he demanded.

УI donТt know. IТm an orphan, Master Croysus,Ф she reminded him patiently. УA foundling. The librarians have always taken us in; they train us to become scribes and translators. We get accustomed early to living and working in stone suspended between sky and sea.Ф

УSo youТre content here?Ф

She flung him an uncertain glance, wondering what he meant. УI donТt think about it,Ф she answered. УI have nothing of my own, nothing thatТs not on loan from the librarians. Not even my name. I donТt know what else I could choose.Ф

УDo you like the work?Ф

She smiled, smelling books now, leather bindings, musty parchments, flaking scrolls that lived with her underground. УHere,Ф she told him, Уthere is no time. No past, no future; no place I canТt go, no lost realm I canТt travel to, as long as I can decipher its fish.Ф

She showed him where she worked. It was a doorless cell lined with books, a cell in a hive that was itself a cell in the huge hive that clung by walls and pillars and towers of stone to the immense, steep cliff rising straight out of the sea. The palace of the rulers of Raine had grown from a seedling through the centuries. Long ago, it had been little more than a fortress on the edge of the world, guarding its portion of thick wood and plain against other princelings. Through the centuries, the palace had become a small country itself, existing between sea and air, burrowed deep into the cliffs, piled above the earth so high that on a clear day, from the highest tower, the new Queen of Raine could see all but three of the Twelve Crowns she ruled. The first king had taken the first Crown: lands as far as he could see from his single tower. Before he died, he had added two linked Crowns to his own. Now there were twelve, and they flew on a tower higher than the king could ever imagine, even in his wildest dreams, as he guarded Raine in his sleep in the secret cave within the cliff below the palace.

So many lands had produced so many words. During the centuries they found their way, in one collection or another, to the royal library. The library was a city carved into the cliffs beneath the palace. Parts of it were so old that scrolls and manuscripts got lost for entire reigns and were discovered again in the next. Languages transmuted constantly as they wandered in and out of the Twelve Crowns. Such mysteries required flexible minds. A librarian had found the baby sitting abandoned on the sheer edge of the world; the librarians kept her. That proved shrewd. Nepenthe had drooled on words, talked at them, and tried to eat them until she learned to take them into her eyes instead of her mouth. Surrounded by that rich hoard into which chance and death had brought her, she had not yet imagined any other kingdom.

Within those stones she had grown her weedy way into a young woman, long-boned and strong, able to reach high shelves without a stool. Her hair, which was waist-long and crow-feather dark, she kept bundled at her neck with leather ties; during the course of the day she would inevitably pull them out to use as book marks. In that sunless place, her skin stayed brown as hazelnut. The eyes that gazed absently back at her in the mornings from her wash-basin were sometimes green and sometimes brown. What Master Croysus had seen in her face, she had no idea. She was curious about it, as she was about nearly everything, but that would have to wait.

He examined her tiny space, a shallow cave so full of shelves that her table barely fit among the books, and she had to sit with her stool in the hallway. He looked at work she had done, the fat jars of ink colored variously and stamped with her initial, her carefully sharpened nibs. Finally, reassured, he unrolled his manuscript again. They discussed the oval, finny letters with an eye here, a gill there at random. He told her his ideas; she pulled down previous alphabets she had deciphered, one seemingly of twigs, another of bird-claw impressions in wax. By the time Daimon came to show him his bed-chamber, Master Croysus seemed content to leave his treasure with her.

She dreamed that night about fish, bright flashing schools of them whose whirls and darts and turnings this way and that meant something vital in a language of fish. But what? She struggled with it, trying to persuade her unwieldy human body to move gracefully among the little butterfly flirtings, until finally in her dream she swam with them, wheeling and shining, at ease in the water, speaking the invisible language of fish.

Deep in the stones, playing among the fish, she was scarcely aware of the coronation above her head. Master Croysus vanished for most of a day or two, then came to her late in the morning, reeking of smoke, his hair standing on end, to see how far she had gotten into the mystery. He seemed pleased with her work, and less pleased with what was going on in the complex and incomprehensible palace above ground.

УSheТs very young,Ф he muttered of the new queen. УYounger than you, and with far less Ч far less Ч Ф

Less what he could not find a word for. Nepenthe, oblivious of most of what went on beyond the library, assumed that the world would take care of itself, and got on with her fish.

That night she woke with a start to the sound of her name.

She answered instantly, pulling herself upright out of a stupor of dreams: УYes.Ф

Then she opened her eyes, puzzled. The world was so still that it might have vanished, swallowed by its own past or future. The name was already fading; she could only hear the backwashed eddies and echoes of it in her head. Outside her door, the stone corridors were silent; no one had called Nepenthe. Neither the drowsing embers in her brazier nor the single star hanging in the high narrow window shed any light upon the matter. Yet someone had dropped a word like a weight on a plumb line straight into her heart and she had recognized her name.