"Michael Moorcock - Castle Brass 2 - The Champion of Garathor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

While looking down upon the courtyard, he had been unable to rid himself of the sensation of
observing particularly detailed models; models which moved and talked, yet were models
nonetheless. He felt he could reach down and move a horse-man to the other side of the courtyard,
or pick up Count Brass himself and send him off away from Londra in another direc-tion all
together. He had vague feelings of resentment towards his old friend which he could not
understand. Sometimes it occurred to him, in dreams, that Count Brass had bought his own life with
that of his daughter. Yet how could that be? And neither was it a thing which Count Brass could
possibly con-ceive of doing. On the contrary, the brave old warrior would have given his life for
a loved one without a second thought. Still, Hawkmoon could not drive the thought from his skull.
For a moment he felt a pang of regret, wondering if he should, after all, have agreed to accompany
Count Brass to Lon-dra. He watched as Captain Josef Vedla rode forward and ord-ered the portcullis
raised in the gateway. Count Brass had left Hawkmoon to rule in his place; but really the stewards
and the veteran Guardians of the Kamarg could run things perfectly well and would make no demands
on Hawkmoon for a deci-sion.
But no, thought Hawkmoon. This was not a time for action, but a time for thought. He was
determined to find a way through to those ideas which he could feel in the back of his own mind
and yet which he could not, as yet, reach. For all his old friends might disdain his тАШplaying with
toy soldiers' he knew that by putting the models through a thousand permutations it might release,
at some point, those thoughts, those elusive no-tions which would lead him to the truth involving
his own situation. And once he understood the truth, he was sure he would find Yisselda alive. He
was almost sure, too, that he would find two children - perhaps a boy and a girl. They had all
judged him mad for five years, yet he was convinced that he had not been mad. He believed that he
knew himself too well - that if he ever did go mad it would not be in the way his friends had
described.
Now Count Brass and his retinue were waving to the castle's retainers as they rode through the
gates on the first stage of the long journey to Londra.
Contrary to Count Brass's suspicions, Dorian Hawkmoon still held his old friend in great esteem.
It caused him a pang of sorrow to see Count Brass leaving. Hawkmoon's problem was that he could no
longer express any of the sentiments he felt. He had become too single-minded in his
considerations, too absorbed in the problems which he attempted to solve in his obsessive
manipulation of the tiny figures on his boards.
Hawkmoon continued to watch as Count Brass and his men rode down through the winding streets of
Aigues-Mortes. The streets were lined with townsfolk, bidding Count Brass fare-well. At last the
party reached the walls of the town and rode out across the broad road through the marshes.
Hawkmoon looked after them until they were out of sight, then he turned his attention back to his
models.
Currently he was working out a situation in which the Black Jewel had not been set in his
forehead, but in that of Oladahn of the Bulgar Mountains, and where the Legion of the Dawn could
not be summoned. Would the Dark Empire have been defeated then? And if it could have been
defeated, how might that have been accomplished? He had reached the point he had reached a hundred
times before, of reenacting the Battle of Londra. But this time it struck him that he, himself,
might have been killed. Would this have saved Yisselda's life?
If he hoped, by going through these permutations of past events, to find a means of releasing the
truth he believed to be hidden in his mind, he failed again. He completed the tactics involved, he


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noted the fresh possibilities involved, he considered his next development. He wished that