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

him. He looked at her, still playing, and realized in that moment how she had changed, from the slight, freckled girl he had first met.
Her harper's hands were pale as sea spume; her long hair gleamed like pearl. She knew things, he thought suddenly. She held secrets,
now, in the long, slender lines of her body she held some music he had never heard before. "Rook," she prodded while his pipes
spoke back to a passing gull. He lowered them finally, still gazing at her.
"Who wants me?"
"Bard Trefon, Bard Galea, Bard Horum. They want you to make a decision. About your future." She had a northerner's way of
chopping sentences into neat portions, as if they were carrots.
"There's no decision to make," he answered simply. "I'm staying here."
"It's more complicated. They said. What you must choose."
"Staying or going is one or the other. It's not complicated." He added as she sighed, "I'll stay here and teach. It's what I want."
"How can you not want to be a bard? How can you want this rock?" she asked incredulously. "You could have the world. If you
would only learn to harp. It's what the world wants."
"I don't want the world." The spare, taut lines of his face softened at her bewilderment. "Sirina." The color of her eyes distracted him
suddenly; he forgot what he was going to say.
"You can play anything else. You can tell any tale. Sing any song. Why do you balk over a harp? Anyone can play it. You don't have
to play it with your heart. Not to please the land barons. Just with your fingers."
"I prefer the picochet."
"Peasant."
He smiled. "Very likely." Her eyes had changed at his smile, become shadowy, mysterious. Their color kept eluding him. "Mussels,"
he decided, and her gaze became skewed.
"What about them?"
"It's a riddle," he said, following an ancient formula. "Answer: I am the color of mussel shells."
Her eyes narrowed faintly, holding his. "Is that so," she said softly. "Answer: I am the color of a starless night."
"Is that so." His hand dropped to the ground, very close to hers. Neither of them blinked. "Answer: I am a son without a father, a
bird without a song. Who am I?"
He watched her lips gather around the first letter of his name. He bent his head, gently took the rest of it from her. She opened her
eyes as he drew back; they had grown very dark. He heard her swallow.
"Rook." Her fingers shifted in the grass, touched his. "They're waiting."
"Will you?" he asked as he stood. He had an impression, as her hair roiled away from her into the wind, of someone rising out of
foam. "Will you wait?"
Her eyes answered.
He felt something leap in him like a salmon, flicking drops of water into light on its run toward home. I'm never leaving, he thought,
striding toward the ancient, drafty pile of stone in which he could still hear, late at night, between the wind and the wild burst of the
tide, the final cry of the bard imprisoning all the magic in the hinterlands. Never.
"You have three choices," Bard Galea told him. Her hair was more silver now than gold, but she still had the mermaid's enchanting
smile. "You may choose to stay here and teach. Which is what I think you want."
"Or you may choose to master the harp and be called bard," Bard Trefon said. "Which is what I think you should do. Then you will
leave Luly and find your future with some house or court or school in need of a bard. If you choose that, remember that the farther
you go from Luly, the more the word 'bard' changes, until, if you go far enough south, you will hardly recognize yourself." He
waited, dark brows lifted, still questioning, after so many years, still hoping. Rook turned to Bard Horum, a tall, very old man who
looked, with his pure white coloring and ancient, oval eyes, as if he might once have been a unicorn.
"Or," the third bard said, "you may take the path across the sea to the hinterlands, and let what comes to you there decide your fate.
If you choose that, remember that you may not find your way back to Luly."
Rook started to answer. The unicorn's eyes held him, powerful and still. Did you? Rook wanted to ask. What did you find there? "I
choose," he said to Bard Horum, and caught himself, startled and breathless, as if he had nearly walked over a cliff. He blinked away
from the ancient gaze, and it dropped, hid itself. He turned back to Bard Galea's smile. "I choose to stay."
That night he dreamed of fire.
He woke not knowing his own name, consumed, as with a sudden fever, by the knowledge that he had a past hidden by fire, another
name. Somewhere on the mainland, the blackened, crumbling walls of a farmhouse held his name. He could not find his future
without his past. He could not play a true note, even on the picochet, or sing a word that meant itself, without his past. He lay awake