"Mary Renault - Greece 1 - The King Must Die" - читать интересную книгу автора (Renault Mary)

one was small and dark; but so was the girl's brother.
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My birth month came, when I should be seventeen. And on the day of my birth, in the moon's second
quarter, my mother said to me alone, "Theseus, come with me; I have something to show you."

My heart paused in its beating. A secret so long kept is like a lyre-string stretched near breaking, which a
feather will sound, or a breath of air. Silence held me, as it had before the earthquake.

I went with her; and she led me through the postern, up the road to the hills. I walked half a pace behind
her, going softly. The path skirted a gorge, where the mountain stream ran deep, green with ferns below
and woods above; we crossed it by a great flat boulder, put there by giants before anyone remembers.
And all the while I thought my mother looked quiet and sad, and my heart was chilled; this was not the
countenance, I thought, of women whom gods have favored.

We turned up from the stream, and came into the holy Grove of Zeus. It had been old already on the
hillside in the time of the Shore People who had the land before us. And even they can only say it has
been there time out of mind.

It is so quiet there, you can hear an acorn dropping. Now it was spring; the leaves were tender on the
great gnarled boughs; and about the trunks which two men's arms together could hardly span, faint starry
shade-flowers grew. Last year's oak leaves smelled musty underfoot, soft and black, or brown and
rustling. All the way we had not spoken, and now the snapping of a twig seemed loud.

In the midst of the wood was the most sacred spot, where Zeus had hurled his thunderbolt. The ancient
oak it had blasted had almost rotted into the ground, it was so long ago. But though the huge limbs were
perishing among the brambles, a stump like a tooth still stood, with a secret life in it; faint buds of green
showed on the roots where they humped like knees above the earth. The spot is so sacred that no
sapling has dared to grow there since Cloud-Gatherer struck it; through the hole in the green roof one
can see the sea.

My mother walked on in her gold-clasped sandals, lifting her skirt in front to clear the slope. Fawn-spots
of sun fell on her fine bronze hair, and on the thin shift under her bodice which showed the pink tips of her
moving breasts. Her forehead was broad, her gray eyes widely set, with soft brows nearly meeting above
her straight proud nose; the arch over the eye was her greatest beauty, and the smooth clear curve up
from the eyelid. Like any priestess, she had a mouth for secrets; but it was serious, not sly like some one
sees. Though I could never see it when people said I was like her, I was always glad if they said I had
her eyes. Mine looked bluer because I was tanned, and my chin was my own, or else my father's. But to
me, this long-time now, she was the priestess no one dares question, more than she was anything else.
She seemed armored in the Goddess; so that if she were to tell me my father was Thyestes the lame
stillman who brewed her bathscent, or a swineherd from the back hills, it would not touch nor shame her,
but only me.

She led me up to the sacred oak, and stopped; and I saw at her feet a stone.

I knew it. I had found it as a boy, when Dexios and I first went tiptoe to the oak wood, daring each other
under the gaze of the trees; the dryads who live there stare harder into one's back than anywhere else I