"Patricia A. McKillip - Song for the Basilisk" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

He rose then, stepped out of the boat to meet the fire.
It turned itself into torches. Men and women circled him, questioning in lilting, sinewy voices. Their long hair and windblown robes
flowed in and out of the night; the uneasy tide spilled against the rock behind them, tossed a glittering spindrift over them, so that
they seemed to reshape themselves constantly out of fire and wind and sea. Their faces resembled the faces of animals in old
tapestries: lean-jawed wolves and foxes, golden-eyed owls, falcons, even a unicorn, with white skin and hair, and eyes like ovals of
night. But they spoke and smiled like humans. Their words, holding no shadow of grief, weariness, despair, seemed of another
language, that he once knew, and still recognized.
"Caladrius," said one of the men who had brought him, in answer to a question. "Call him Caladrius."
He felt a hand under his chin, met eyes that seemed, in the torchlight, as gold as coins. She was a sea creature, he saw: half fish, half

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McKillip, Patricia A. - Song for the Basilisk

woman, who rose up out of waves on the backs of his father's chairs, with a shell in her hand and a mysterious smile on her face. The
woman drew damp strands of hair out of his eyes. Her own hair, the color of wheat, fell in a fat braid over her shoulder. It seemed to
him like some rare, astonishing treasure; his fingers lifted of their own accord, touched it. Her mouth smiled, but her eyes, not quite
smiling, searched for the past he had abandoned.
She said slowly, "It's a complex name for one so young."
"That's all we were told." The man's hands lay gently on his shoulders, still holding him; his voice was dark and taut with past.
"After we found him in the ashes. The farm in the provinces burned with everything in it. His family. Everyone. Tell him that when
he asks. He doesn't remember anything."
"Then who told you his name?"
"His great-uncle. I doubt that even he lived much longer, after he told us to bring the child here. Will you keep him?"
He heard tide gather and break, far away. Gather and break. His breath gathered; he waited, watching the woman's face. She spoke
finally, her slender fingers, white as spindrift, sliding over his head.
"We'll call him Rook, for his black, black eyes." She glanced around the circle, her gold brows raised, questioning silently; there was
no dissent in the strange, wild faces gazing at him. "Rook Caladrius. And if he begins to remember?"
"Then he will name himself."
The man's fingers tightened on his shoulders, then loosed him abruptly. He turned, saw all that was left of his past get back into the
boat. For a moment ash sparked, flamed in his chest; he swallowed fire, watching until the boat was only a tiny, glowing lamp
swaying above the waves. He turned then, feeling nothing, empty as the air between sea and stars. He followed the strangers up the
endless stone stairway along the face of the rock, his eyes on the next step, the next. Near the top he stopped abruptly, staring up at
the tiers of fire-washed windows carved out of the stones. The woman behind him, keeping a hand at his back, asked, "What is it,
Rook?"
He said, astonished, "The rock sang."
The ancient school on Luly, he learned, was older than the name of the rock, older than the language of humans. It rose out of rock
like something sculpted by wind, shaped by storm. It was never silent. Sea frothed and boomed constantly around it. Gulls with their
piercing voices cried tales passed down from bards who spoke the forgotten language of birds. Seals, lifting their faces out of the
waves, told other tales to the wind. Wind answered, sometimes lightly, sometimes roaring out of the northern hinterlands like the
sound of all the magic there, if it had one word to speak, and a voice to speak it with. Then the rock would sing in answer, its own
voice too deep to be heard, a song that could be felt, running from stone into bone, and from there into the heart, to be transformed
into the language of dreams, of poetry. Rook heard the rock sing again the first night he slept there. Later, out of stone, he made his
first song.
He played it one day on a single-stringed instrument whose unpredictable sounds, sometimes tender, sometimes ragged and eerie,
said best what he saw. Bard Galea, the woman who had named him, was pleased. Bard Trefon, whose deep eyes and dark skin
reminded Rook of the seals that peered out of the waves around the rock, was not.
"I hear seagulls squabbling in it," she said. "And the wind. And ravens calling your name."
"I hear the picochet," Bard Trefon protested. "I am trying to teach him the harp."
"Well, he was born in the provinces, of course he would be drawn to the picochet. It's the farmers' instrument; he must have heard it
in the womb."