"Dan Parkinson - Dragonlance Tales - Cataclysm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Parkinson Dan)

collapse of Istar, whereby his singing lost its sense, and
finally from a blind juggler wandering the depths of the
plains, whose version was wild and comical, a better story
by far than Arion's.
The minstrel and the juggler repeated Father's altered
lines word for word. But the juggler recited them with a
curious look, as though he was remembering words contrary
to those he was speaking. Although I asked him and asked
him again about it, he would tell me nothing. Faced with his
silence, I began to believe I had imagined his discomfort,
that it was only my hope and dreaming that had expected to
find the missing lines.
And so, back across the straits I sailed, in the summer
of my sixteenth year, and again the ferryman called me
Fire-bringer, cursing me and spitting at me as he took my
money.
On Solamnic shores once more, I started for home, but
discovered that no village would shelter me on the journey.
"Firebringer," they called me, and "Orestes the Torch,"
meeting me on the outskirts of the hamlets with torches of
their own, with stones and rakes and long peninsular knives.
Some even pursued me, shouting that the fires would
die with the one who brought them. Like the ferryman, like
Finn, they thought I was my father.

*****

To the north lay the great Solamnic castles - Vingaard and
Dargaard, Brightblade and Thelgaard and DiCaela. Each
would take me in of a night for the sake of my grandfather.
These families would nurse me on occasion, for my scars
burned with growing intensity as the seasons turned and the
fires to the west raged and the years passed by me.
Sometimes the knights let me stay for a week, perhaps two,
but the peasants would clamor, would talk of traitors and
firebrands, and I would be asked to leave, would be
escorted from Solamnic holdings by a handful of armed
cavalry.
The knights would apologize there at the borders, and
tell me that their hearts were heavy for me ... that the
welfare of the order and the people took precedence . . .
that, had there been another way, they would have been
glad to ...
In all those high places, I asked after Arion's song.
Solamnia was, after all, the bard's sanctuary, the harp's
haven. All of the schooled poets had retreated to these
courts, and all knew the works of Arion of Coastlund.
I showed around the scratched and amended passage
near the poem's end. All the bards remembered it, and
remembered no other version. As I sat alone in the vaulted