"A. E. Merritt - Dwellers In The Mirage - v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

my spine. For had not the old Uighur priest spoken of
the Shadow-land? And it was as though I had heard
the echo of his words.

I looked over to where he lay. He had been more
akin to me than my own brothers. I smiled at that, for
they had never been akin to me. To all but my soft-
voiced, deep-bosomed, Norse mother I had been a stranger
in that severely conventional old house where I had
been born.

The youngest son, and an unwelcome
intruder; a changeling. It had been no fault of mine
that I had come into the world a throw-back to my
mother's yellow-haired, blue-eyed, strong-thewed Viking
forefathers. Not at all a Langdon. The Langdon men
were dark and slender, thin-lipped and saturnine.
stamped out by the same die for generations. They
looked down at me, the changeling, from the family
portraits with faintly amused, supercilious hostility.
Precisely as my father and my four brothers, true Langdons,
each of them, looked at me when I awkwardly disposed
of my bulk at their table.

It had brought me unhappiness, but it had made my
mother wrap her heart around me. I wondered, as I had
wondered many times, how she had come to give herself
to that dark, self-centred man my fatherЧwith the blood
of the sea-rovers singing in her veins. It was she who
had named me LeifЧas incongruous a name to tack on
a Langdon as was my birth among them.

Jim and I had entered Dartmouth on the same day.
I saw him as he was thenЧthe tall, brown lad with his
hawk face and inscrutable black eyes. pure blood of the
Cherokees, of the clan from which had come the great
Sequoiah, a clan which had produced through many
centuries wisest councillors, warriors strong in cunning.

On the college roster his name was written James T.
Eagles, but on the rolls of the Cherokee Nation it was
written Two Eagles and his mother had called him
Tsantawu. From the first we had recognized spiritual
kinship. By the ancient rites of his people we had become
blood-brothers, and he had given me my secret name.
known only to the pair of us, DegatagaЧone who stands
so close to another that the two are one.

My one gift, besides my strength, is an aptness at
languages. Soon I spoke the Cherokee as though I had