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

With mighty roots beneath the mold.
THE POETIC EDDA,
"The Wise Woman's Prophecy"

I am Oona, the shape-taker, Grafin von Bek, daughter of Oon the Dreamthief and
Elric, Sorcerer Emperor of Melnibone. When my husband was kidnapped by
Kakatanawa warriors, in pursuit of him I descended into the maelstrom and
discovered an impossible America. This is that story.
With the Second World War over at last and peace of sorts returned to Europe, I
closed our family cottage on the edge of the Grey Fees, and settled in
Kensington, West London, with my husband Ulric, Count Bek. Although I am an
expert archer and trained mistress of illusory arts, I had no wish to follow my
mother's calling. For a year or two in the late 1940s I lacked a focus for my
skills until I found a vocation in my husband's sphere. The unity of shared
terror and grief following the Nazi defeat gave
us all the strength we needed to rebuild, to rediscover our idealism and try to
ensure that we would never again slide into aggressive bigotry and
authoritarianism.
Knowing that every action taken in one realm of the multi-verse is echoed in the
others, we devoted ourselves confidently to the UN and the implementation of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights which H. G. Wells had drafted, in direct
reference to Paine and the U.S. Founding Fathers, just before the War. The
U.S.A.'s own Eleanor Roosevelt had helped the momentum. Our hope was that we
could spread the values of liberal humanism and popular government across a
world yearning for peace. Needless to say, our task was not proving an easy one.
As the Greeks and Iroquois, who fathered those ideas, discovered, there is
always more immediate profit to be gained from crisis than from tranquillity.
By September 1951, Ulric and I had both been working too hard, and because I
traveled so much in my job, we had chosen to educate our children at boarding
school in England. Michael Hall in rural Sussex was a wonderful school, run on
the Steiner Waldorf system, but I still felt a certain guilt about being absent
so often. In previous months Ulric had been sleeping badly, his dreams troubled
by what he sometimes called "the intervention," when Elric's soul, permanently
bonded to his, experienced some appalling stress. For this reason, among others,
we were enjoying a long break at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed summer house of
Nova Scotian friends currently working in Trinidad. They were employed by the
West Indies Independence Commission. When they returned to Cap Breton we would
then leave their airy home to visit some of Ulric's relatives in New England
before taking the Queen Elizabeth back to Southampton.
We had the loveliest weather. There was already a strong hint of autumn in the
coastal breezes and a distinct chill to the water we shared with the seals, who
had established a small colony on one of the many wooded islands of the Sound.
These islands were permanently fascinating. The comings and goings of the
wildlife provided just the right relaxation after a busy year. While Ulric
and I enjoyed our work, it involved a great deal of diplomacy, and sometimes our
faces ached from smiling! Now we could laze, read, frown if we felt like it and
stop to enjoy some of nature's most exquisite scenery.
We were thoroughly relaxed by the second Saturday after we arrived. Brought by
the local taxi from Englishtown, we had become wonderfully isolated, with no car
and no public transport. I must admit I was so used to activity that after a few