"Mary Stewart - The Arthurian Saga 01 - The Crystal Cave2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

was crowned King.

The years since then seem to me now more dim and faded than the earlier
years, as if my life were a growing tree which burst to flower and leaf
with him, and now has nothing more to do than yellow to the grave.
This is true of all old men, that the recent past is misted, while
distant scenes of memory are clear and brightly coloured.
Even the scenes of my far childhood come back to me now sharp and high
coloured and edged with brightness, like the pattern of a fruit tree
against a white wall, or banners in sunlight against a sky of storm.

The colours are brighter than they were, of that I am sure.

The memories that come back to me here in the dark are seen with the new
young eyes of childhood; they are so far gone from me, with their pain
no longer present, that they unroll like pictures of something that
happened, not to me, not to the bubble of bone that this memory used to
inhabit, but to another Merlin as young and light and free of the air
and spring winds as the bird she named me for.

With the later memories it is different; they come back, some of them,
hot and shadowed, things seen in the fire.
For this is where I gather them.

This is one of the few trivial tricksi cannot call it powerleft to me
now that I am old and stripped at last down to man.
I can see still .

not clearly or with the call of trumpets as I once did, but in the
child's way of dreams and pictures in the fire.

I can still make the flames burn up or die; it is one of the simplest of
magics, the most easily learned, the last forgotten.

What I ll cannot recall in dream I see in the flames, the red heart of
the fire or the countless mirrors of the crystal cave.

The first memory of all is dark and fireshot.
It is not my own memory, but later you will understand how I know these
things.

You would call it, not memory so much as a dream of the past, something
in the blood, something recalled from him, it may be, while he still
bore me in his body.
I believe that such things can be.

So it seems to me right that I should start with him who was before me,
and who will be again when I am gone.

This is what happened that night.