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

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.