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

"Wait!" Curren screamed, his exhausted voice carrying faintly on the
wind.
"Touch not that man!" Columba exhorted.
"It's ... It's going away," Brude said slowly, his tone throbbing with
disbelief.
"No! Wait!" Curren cried, his voice raw with anger and despair.
"Go back to the bottom of the darkness from which you came!" Columba
cried. "Go!"
They would never agree on who the monster was looking at -- Columba or
Curren -- when it finally sank, silently and completely, back into the opaque
depths of the loch. A series of ripples on the surface marked the creature's
passing, and then the loch looked normal, as it always had, with no trace of
the struggle which had just taken place there or of the ancient secrets which
had briefly revealed themselves to this new world.
Only Curren remained, his cries assailing Aithne's ears with their rage
and desolation, his arms beating angrily against the water, sending up showers
of spray that glistened in the dying sunlight.
It was Columba who swam out to save him, to haul him in against his
will, dragging him back to shore after exhaustion had put an end to his
violent struggles. Curren lay unconscious and half dead as Columba prayed over
him, anointing him in the name of the new god. Aithne saw the expression on
Brude's face as he looked down at the boy's motionless form, and she knew that
he would have preferred to let his nephew drown that day. But Columba was not
about to relinquish his first convert among Brude's people.
The priests who had held sway in Brude's kingdom began to lose their
power that day, and it was not long before Brude himself accepted Columba's
god and joined in the foreign priest's strange water ritual. Aithne and Curren
married when the time was right and their bodies had ripened, and, as she had
promised, they, too, joined the new faith.
Now a quiet young man and obedient warrior, Curren bore the pain of his
new tattoos to please Brude, just as he bore the water ritual to please
Columba. Most of all, though, he bore his loneliness to please Aithne. How
could she know that the pleasures of the flesh she so enjoyed, the pleasures
which had left Curren's seed in her belly, were as nothing compared to the
remembered pleasure of the silent songs which had reached out from the loch to
dance in his head?
The songs were gone now, as were the visions. They had disappeared with
his rebirth at Columba's hands, disappeared with the horrifyingly beautiful
creature who had slid into the darkness without him, leaving him behind to
forever bear this strange new world in utter solitude.
Sometimes, when his king did not need him, when his wife would not miss
him, he slipped away for a while, to hide beneath a clump of fir trees and
gaze at the flat, opaque waters of the loch.
Somewhere down there, somewhere so deep that no one could find them,
they lived and died, they ate and mated, and they waited, waited for another
who could hear their song. They had waited millennia for him, and he wondered,
with a heart made raw with longing, if they were now doomed to wait for all
eternity.
-- The End --