"Mary Stewart - The Arthurian Saga 02 - The Hollow Hills" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

would have to pay, and in full. So I had come, but without hope.

There was light here from the torches, light and fire. I was Merlin; I should be able to reach him; I had
talked with the dead before. I stood still, watching the flaring torches, and waited.

Slowly, all through the fortress, I could hear the sounds dwindling and sinking to silence as men finally
went to rest. The sea soughed and beat below the window, the wind plucked at the wall, and ferns
growing there in the crevices rustled and tapped. A rat scuttled and squeaked somewhere. The resin
bubbled in the torches. Sweet and foul, through the sharp smoke, I smelled the smell of death. The
torchlight winked blank and flat from the coins on the dead eyes.

The time crawled by. My eyes ached with the flame, and the pain from my hand, like a biting fetter, kept
me penned in my body. My spirit was pared down to nothing, blind as the dead. Whispers I caught,
fragments of thought from the still and sleepy guards, meaningless as the sound of their breathing, and the
creak of leather or chime of metal as they stirred involuntarily from time to time. But beyond these,
nothing. What power I had been given on that night at Tintagel had drained from me with the strength that
had killed Brithael. It had gone from me and was working, I thought, in a woman's body; in Ygraine, lying
even now beside the King in that grim and battered near-isle of Tintagel, ten miles to the south. I could
do nothing here. The air, solid as stone, would not let me through.

One of the guards, the one nearest me, moved restlessly, and the butt of his grounded spear scraped on
the stone. The sound jarred the silence. I glanced his way involuntarily, and saw him watching me.

He was young, rigid as his own spear, his fists white on the shaft. The fierce blue eyes watched me
unwinkingly under thick brows. With a shock that went through me like the spear striking I recognized
them. Gorlois' eyes. It was Gorlois' son, Cador of Cornwall, who stood between me and the dead,
watching me steadily, with hatred.


In the morning they took Gorlois' body south. As soon as he was buried, Gandar had told me, Uther
planned to ride back to Dimilioc to rejoin his troops until such time as he could marry the Duchess. I had
no intention of waiting for his return. I called for provisions and my horse and, in spite of 'Gandar's
protestations that I was not yet fit for the journey, set out alone for my valley above Maridunum and the
cave in the hill which the King had promised should remain, in spite of everything, my own.

3



No one had been inside the cave during my absence. This was hardly to be wondered at, since the
people held me in much awe as an enchanter, and moreover it was commonly known that the King
himself had granted me the hill Bryn Myrddin. Once I left the main road at the water-mill, and rode up the
steep tributary valley to the cave which had become my home, I saw no one, not even the shepherd who
commonly watched his flocks grazing the stony slopes.

In the lower reaches of the valley the woods were thick; oaks still rustled their withered leaves, chestnut
and sycamore crowded close, fighting for the light, and hollies showed black and glinting between the
beeches. Then the trees thinned, and the path climbed along the side of the valley, with the stream running
deep down on the left, and to the right slopes of grass, broken by scree, rising sharply to the crags that
crowned the hill. The grass was still bleached with winter, but among the rusty drifts of last year's