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

"We waited. Yes."
"You." He stopped, heard the boat thump hollowly as a wave flung it upside down on the sand. Beneath that, he heard silence again,
as if the trees were listening. He said, "We."
"I called him Hollis. After my grandfather."
His knees turned to nothing; he sank suddenly under! a wave. She tugged him out, laughing again. "Don't be afraid. You'll like him.
He has my eyes."
He tried to speak; words turned to salt. She pounded on his back as he coughed. Brine ran down his face like tears. "Hollis," he said
finally. Then he heard the strange, deep song of the whale weltering up all around him from sea to sky, and he shouted, loud enough
to crumble rock, to overwhelm the magic of the hinterlands, send it fleeing from his heart.
He picked her up, carried her out of the sea.
And so the years passed.
The child in the ashes waited.


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McKillip, Patricia A. - Song for the Basilisk




Chapter Two

┬л^┬╗

In the hall of mirrors at Pellior Palace, within the walled city of Berylon, Giulia Dulcet lifted the instrument in her hands many times
in many different mirrors and began to play. The hall was soundless but for the music; the hundred richly dressed people in it might
have been their own reflections. Arioso Pellior, Duke of Pellior House and Prince of Berylon, stood with his three children across
the room from the musicians. Giulia caught brief glimpses of them now and then as she lowered the sweet, melancholy lavandre to
pass the prince's melody to Hexel on the harpsichord. The prince's compositions seemed predictable but never were: he scattered
accidentals in music, Hexel commented acidly, as in life. Above Arioso's head, the basilisk of Pellior House, in red marble and gold,
reared on its sinuous coils and stared back at itself in the massive frame of the mirror behind the musicians. All around the room the
basilisks roused and glared, frozen in one another's gazes, while mortals, beneath the range of their stony regard, stood transfixed
within the prince's vision.
The composition ended without mishap. Playing the prince's music kept Giulia concentrated and on edge: a note misplaced in his ear
would be enough, she felt, to get them tossed, by the irate composer, out of the Tormalyne School of Music into the gutters of
Berylon. But the muted tap of fans against gloved fingers reassured them. Arioso Pellior acknowledged compliments with a gracious
inclination of his head. The hall quieted for his next composition. Giulia exchanged the lavandre for a flute. She and Hexel played a
duet. Then Hexel sang a love song, a stylized piece with vocal frills that he tossed out as lightly as largesse. Giulia sat listening, a
slender figure in her black magister's robe, her straight, sooty hair neatly bound in a net of gold thread, her tawny, wide-set eyes
discreetly lowered as she listened. Only the lavandre moved to her breathing, its spirals of rosewood and silver throwing sparks of
light at its reflection.
The song ended. The prince's younger daughter, the Lady Damiet, lifted a folded fan to her lips and swallowed a yawn. Her broad,
creamy face revealed nothing of her thoughts; she was reputed to have few. On the other side of the prince stood his son Taur,
twenty years older than Damiet, offspring of Arioso's first marriage. Taur, looking slightly disheveled in his finery, brooded visibly
while the music played, applauded a trifle late when he noticed it had stopped. Taur's wife, a thin lipped woman with restless eyes
the color of prunes seemed to search perpetually for the cause of her annoyance in the mirrored faces. Taur's younger sister Luna
Pellior stood behind Arioso's shoulder, nearly as tall as he, with her hair the rich gold of a dragon's hoard, and her eyes, like her
father's, lizard green. She had his face, Damiet her mother's. The prince's wives had both died, having done their duty to the Basilisk,
and being, so it was widely believed, no longer required.
The hall quieted again. Giulia turned a page and raised the lavandre. Its liquid voice imitated hunting cadences, announcing the