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

"Who lives there?"
"You never know until you go there. Everyone who goes returns with a different tale."
"Have you gone?"
"No." He pulled up his hook. The bait was gone, so was the fish that had taken it. "Not yet. It's where you go to ask a question.
About your life, perhaps. Your future. Or your past. People there tell you. If you listen. If not, you come back at least knowing some
odd tales, very ancient songs. Some never come back."
"What happens to them?"
"'They go elsewhere. They may return to Luly, many years later, and tell what happened to them. Sometimes the bards only hear of
them in a song." He let his line drop again. "Play the song you made for the picochet. See if you can find it on the harp."
He tried, but the sea kept getting in the way of the song, and so did the hinterlands. He gazed at the floating hills, wondering what he
would see if he walked across them, alone through unfamiliar trees, crossing the sun's path to the top of the world. Who would he
meet? In what language would they speak to him? The language the sea spoke intruded then, restless, insistent, trying to tell him
something: what song he heard in the seashell, what word the rock sang, late at night under the heavy pull of the full moon. His
fingers moved, trying to say what he heard, as the sea flowed like blood in and out of the hollows and caves of the rock, trying to
reach its innermost heart, as if it were a string that had never been played. He came close, he felt, reaching for the lowest notes on
the harp. But it was his own heart he split, and out of it came fire, engulfing the rock in the sea.
He cried out. A string snapped, curled with a wail like wood in fire. Bard Trefon, staring at him, reached out, catching the harp
before Rook flung it into the water. "No," he said quickly. "Rook."
Rook stared at him, his heart still burning. "It was on fire."
"I know," the bard breathed. "I heard. Rook. Try again. But this timeтАФ"
His fingers curled into fists. "I will never play it again."
"But you have a gift for it. And there are other songs."
"No." He added, as the bard watched him, brows crooked and questioning, "There is a fish on your line."
"Rook."
He turned away, tugged at the dancing, thumping line until Bard Trefon finally put the harp away and helped him.
The more the bards taught him, the farther back he drove the fire and what lay within it. He built walls of words against it; he
charmed it away with music. There was nothing, it seemed, he could not learn in order to escape. He changed the meanings of words
without realizing it. Becoming a bard meant becoming someone who knew no past but poetry, he thought. A bard changed the past
to song, set it to music, and made it safe. So he learned the tales of the hinterlands, the provinces; he played their instruments even in
his dreams, until he woke with strange cadences and ancient languages he almost understood fading in his head. He was taught, in
cursory fashion, of the city south of the provinces, which had a sheathed, dangerous paw on the world around him. But its music
made him uneasy. Like the harp, it led him back, toward the past; it smelled of fire. Its bright, sweet, complex language was not
rooted in wind and stone; it was too new. It held no word for bard. So he reached back, finding past and eluding it, as far as he could,
to the first words, the first tales, the first sounds fashioned out of the language of birds and insects, the whine of wind and wolf, the
sough of the sea, the silence of death, all the sounds the first bard had woven into his song. After eight years on Luly, he could spin
poetry from his dreams, and play anything his hands touched. After three more years the bards of Luly said that he was ready to
choose his future.


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McKillip, Patricia A. - Song for the Basilisk

He had grown tall and muscular, his long, fair hair usually a rook's nest of wind and brine, his rook's eyes, beneath level brows, so
dark they seemed without pupils. His rare smile softened their grimness. When he played, his face lost its usual calm. Someone else,
the boy in the boat perhaps, staring unflinchingly at fire, looked out of his eyes; they reflected what he did not remember seeing.
"You should call yourself Caladrius," he was told sometimes. "It's a name more suitable for a bard."
He would shrug. "Rook suits me." And when he played, they saw the raven in his eyes.
He sat on a grassy slope outside the school one sunny day, imitating birds on the clay pipes, when the bards summoned him to make
his choice. The summons came in the form of Sirina, a land baron's daughter from northern provinces. She had been at the school for
three years; she had a restless nature and a spellbinding way with a harp. "You're wanted," she said, and sat down on the grass beside