"Michael Moorcock - Elric 2 - Sailor on the Sea of Fate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

led their masters to the beach. He shrugged. Best to die
here alone, perhaps, slaughtered by those who did not even
know his name. His only regret would be that Cymoril
would wonder why he had not returned at the end of the
year.

He had no food and few of the drugs which had of late
sustained his energy. Without renewed energy he could not
contemplate working a sorcery which might conjure for
him some means of crossing the sea and making, perhaps,
for the Isle of the Purple Towns where the people were
least unfriendly to Melniboneans.

It had been only a month since he had left behind his
court and his queen-to-be, letting Yyrkoon sit on the
throne of Melnibone until his return. He had thought he
might learn more of the human folk of the Young Kingdoms
by mixing with them, but they had rejected him either with
outright hatred or wary and insincere humility. Nowhere
had he found one willing to believe that a Melnibonean
(and they did not know he was the Emperor) would willingly
throw in his lot with the human beings who had once been
in thrall to that cruel and ancient race. And now, as he
stood beside a bleak sea feeling trapped and already
defeated, he knew himself to be alone in a malevolent
universe, bereft of friends and purpose, a useless, sickly
anachronism, a fool brought low by his own insufficiencies
of character, by his profound inability to believe wholly in
the rightness or wrongness of anything at all. He lacked

faith in his race, in his birthright, in gods or men; and


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above all he lacked faith in himself.

His pace slackened; his hand fell upon the pommel of his
black runesword Stormbringer, the blade which had so
recently defeated its twin, Mournblade, in the fleshy
chamber within a sunless world of Limbo. Stormbringer,
seemingly half-sentient, was now his only companion, his
only confidant, and it had become his neurotic habit to
talk to the sword as another might talk to his horse or as a
prisoner might share his thoughts with a cockroach in his
cell.

'Well, Stormbringer, shall we walk into the sea and end
it now?' His voice was dead, barely a whisper. 'At least we