"Laura Resnick - Curren's Song" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Laura)

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Curren's Song
by Laura Resnick
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Copyright (c)1993 by Laura Resnick
First published in Dinosaur Fantastic, July 1993

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Science Fiction


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_In the sixth century A.D., Saint Columba left Ireland and ventured
into Scotland where he preached to the Picts, whose warriors were covered with
blue tattoos or body dye. According to the saint's biographer, he saved a
swimmer from the Loch Ness Monster by ordering it away. This so impressed
Brude, the local king, that he and his people converted to Christianity._
_One theory about the Loch Ness Monster is that a small herd of
plesiosaurs have survived in that isolated environment -- like the coelacanth,
some thirty of which have been caught in the South Atlantic despite prior
belief that they had been extinct for seventy million years._
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The sky was grey, a wet, mourning color that did not change from dawn
till dusk. A misty rain fell softly upon the steep green hills, its rhythm
soothing and hypnotic. The steady, gentle sound comforted Curren's wounded
spirit as he crept beneath the sheltering branches of a clump of fir trees
overlooking the loch, the great inland sea which split the land like a deep
wound.
Curren sat on the damp ground and hugged his knees, gritting his teeth
and refusing to cry as he stared at the black surface of the water. He was too
old for tears, he told himself.
Why had the gods cursed him with their visions? What sort of life was
this for a boy about to become a man? To be forever an outsider, forever
different, forever apart from his own people. Laughed at by some, shunned by
others, ridiculed or feared since his birth, each day of his life brought a
fresh, piercing pain.
This morning he had done it again, had spoken when he should have kept
silent. He could never separate the things everyone knew and saw from the
things that he alone knew and saw, and so he was forever alienating everyone
around him.