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

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McKillip, Patricia A. - Song for the Basilisk

in the dark, staring at it, listening to the rill of the tide filling hollows beneath the school. When night finally relinquished its grip of
him, he still felt blind, memoryless, as if he had only dreamed his life, and had wakened to find himself among ashes, without words
and understanding nothing.
"I can't make a choice yet," he told the bards in the morning, trembling with weariness, rubbing at the rasp behind his reddened eyes.
"I'm going to the provinces."
This time the seal's eyes watched him, curious, approving. The unicorn's eyes were still hidden.
He left three days later at dawn. Sirina rowed him to shore. They did not speak until the boat scraped bottom and he jumped into the
waves to run it out again on the outgoing tide. She said, softly, her face quiet and pale in the new light, "I'll give you a thread. To
find your way back."
"Or for you to find me," he breathed, and she nodded. She leaned forward abruptly, kissed him before tide pulled the boat out of his
hands. He watched her row halfway to Luly while he stood knee-deep in surf, pack and picochet dangling from his shoulders, still
tasting her sea-salt kiss.
Finally he turned, found a beach littered with driftwood and mussel shells, without a footprint, human or otherwise, anywhere in the
sand. Beyond it lay the wild land north of the provinces, the forests and hills flowing to the end of the world. He felt its pull, its
mystery, as strong as the tide carrying his heart back to Luly, as strong as the name waiting to be found in the provinces. He waded
out of the water, shook the sea out of his boots, and began to walk south toward the villages and farmlands, the great houses of the
provincial barons. Ravens cried at him from the ancient forest, raucous, persistent. He did not know their language, he explained
silently to them; he did not understand. Later, when they dropped a black trail of feathers to guide him into the unknown, he refused
to see.
He played the picochet in farmhouses, in inns, the flute and the lute in barons' courts all over the provinces. Sometimes he stayed a
night, sometimes a month or two, playing whatever he was handed, singing whatever he was asked. He was given lodgings, coins,
new boots, new songs, a strange instrument that had found its way out of the hinterlands, a haircut, an embroidered case for his
picochet, many local tales, and offers of positions ranging from tavern musician to court bard. But he could stay nowhere. His rook's
eyes searched for fire everywhere. He was shown charred, ruined farmhouses, or the place where they had been before they were
rebuilt, or the cornfield where the farm had stood before it burned and its ashes were plowed under. Solk, their name was, or
Peerson, or Gamon. They had lost a baby, or a cat, or all their horses, or everything but each other. A terrible fire with only one
child, a son, left alive? That sounded like the Leafers, but no, only the grandmother had been left alive in that one. She had wandered
out of the house in her nightgown in the middle of the night, thinking she heard her baby son crying. She woke to hear him crying to
wake his own children inside the burning house. The Sarters in the next valley had lost their cows when the barn burned, butтАж The
Tares' girl had lost her parents, but there were those who said she had started the fire herself.
He couldn't say who had taken him to Luly?
He couldn't say why Luly?
He couldn't say why the name Caladrius and no other?
He couldn't say.
"But you must belong here," he was told many times. "The way you play the picochet. You must have heard it in the womb."
He was certain he could not stay? Not even ifтАФ
He was certain.
He returned at night, nearly two years later, alone, on foot. He lit a fire on the beach and sat there, listening to the dead silence in the
forest behind him, waiting while a star moved across the water in answer to his fire. Before the boat entered the tide, something
spoke in the dead silence of his heart. He got to his feet without realizing it. When the tide caught the boat, and the lamp careened
wildly on the prow, he left pack and picochet on the sand and ran into the water.
Sirina caught him as he caught the boat. Tide poured between them; the boat tilted, spilled her into his arms. An oar went its own
way; the star was doused.
"You're here," he kept saying, stunned. "You're still here."
"You came back." A wave broke over them; laughed, wiping her face with her wet sleeve, then his face. "You took long enough."
"You waited for me."