"Eternal Champion - 05 - The Skrayling Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

MICHAEL MOORCOCK
THE SKRAYLING TREE
THE ALBINO IN AMERICA


For Jewell Hodges and them Gibsons with great respect
Thanks, too, as always to Linda Steele for her good taste and patience



Prologue

Nine by nine ana three by three, We shall seek the Skraeling Tree.
WHELDRAKE,
'A Border Tragedy"

The following statement was pinned to a later part of this manuscript. The
editor thought it better placed here, since it purports to be at least a partial
explanation of the motives of our mysteri-ous dream travelers. Only the first
part of this book is written in a different, rather idiosyncratic hand. The
remaining parts of the story are mostly in the handwriting of Count Ulric von
Bek. The note in his hand demanding that the manuscript not be published until
after his death is authentic.
More than one school of magistic philosophy insists that our world is the
creation of human yearning. By the power of our desires alone, we may bring into
being whole universes, entire cosmologies, and supernatural pantheons. Many
believe we dream ourselves into existence and then dream our own gods and
demons, heroes and villains. Each dream, if powerful enough, can produce still
another version of reality in the constantly growing organism that is the
multiverse. They believe that just as we dream creatively, we also dream
destructively. Some of us have the skills and courage to come and go in the
dreams of others, even create our own dreams within the host dream. This was the
accepted wisdom in Melnibone, where I was bom.
In Melnibone we were trained to enter dreams in which we lived whole and very
long lives, gaining the experience such realities brought. I had lived over two
thousand years before I reached the age of twenty-
five. It was a form of longevity I would wish upon only a handful of enemies. We
pay a price for a certain kind of wisdom which brings the power to manipulate
the elements.
If you were lucky, as I was, you did not remember much of these dreams. You
drove them from your mind with ruthless deliberation. But the experience of them
remained in your blood, was never lost. It could be called upon in the creation
of strong sorcery. Our nature dictates that we forget most of what we dream, but
some of the adventures I experienced with my distant relative Count Ulric von
Bek enabled me to record a certain history which intertwined with his. What you
read now, I shall likely forget soon.
These dreams form a kind of apocrypha to my main myth. In one life I was unaware
of my destiny, resisting it, hating it. In another I worked to fulfill that
destiny, all too aware of my fate. But only in this dream am I wholly conscious
of my destiny. And when I have left the dream, it will fade, becoming little