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

afraid. So far, he had been able to concentrate on the challenge, the
test they must pass through to find the day.
So far. He lay on his back, feeling a mass quite close to his face,
as though he were in a box. If he sat up, nothing would stop him.
But the illusion hung there, persistent and subtle: nothing there,
but something. There. They had been instructed, that day to listen
for the sound of the sea and to interpret what it said. Buried in
earth and stone and dark halfway across the plain, he could not
imagine such a thing was possible. Even standing on the edge of the
cliff, staring down at the foaming, churning waters, Bourne had
never heard the sea.
But the mages expected the impossible, and Bourne had learned
that he could occasionally surprise himself.
He had surprised himself simply by staying at the school since
autumn, after his brothers and cousins had made bets that he
wouldnтАЩt last the season. He would send the Floating School
tumbling into the sea, they warned. He would turn himself into a
donkey and forget how to change himself back. The mages would
lock him out sooner or later. Sooner became later; autumn became
winter. In early spring, the Lord of Seale rode to the door of the
school and demanded to speak to his youngest nephew about a
neighborтАЩs daughter who was waning and weeping and writing
poetry about BourneтАЩs golden hair. Find him, the mages had
suggested. If he chooses. If you can. Bourne, buried in dark on that
silent day, could not be found. He had been given a word he had
never encountered before to interpret. Hearing, from very far
away, his uncleтАЩs voice, he mingled the sound of it into his
interpretation of the word and produced a very apt description of
the fiery, puissant, bellowing beast the word named.
This time, he heard nothing but his own breathing, his heartbeat,
his blood. Hard enough to concentrate on the sea, which he could
neither see nor hear, let alone imagine the sound that might come
from it. What he kept seeing was a face. For the first time, he grew
impatient in the charged and magical silence. He wanted to get up,
walk until he found a door, then walk out of the wood toward the
cliff road until he saw again the rider coming toward him, her long
hair shining and crisp as a blackbirdтАЩs feathers, her shoulders as
straight as any hunterтАЩs, her skin like sun-drenched earth.
His breath broke explosively out of him. He held it a moment,
then lay quietly, drawing and loosing air, drawing and loosing
slowly in long, measured cadences, until the dark was filled with
the soft rhythm of it and he recognized, his eyes widening suddenly
and his breath heaving and breaking again, the ceaseless patterns
of the tide.
He smiled in the dark, charmed. So the sea breathed like some
great, restless, dreaming animal. So it spoke. But what did it say?
An ancient and untranslatable language, like the voices of trees,
the voice of wind. It was enough that he had heard it; the mages
could expect no more.
 But it was still dark; he had nothing else to do but listen. Blood in