"Jack Vance - Elder Isles 3 - Madouc" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

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CHAPTER ONE

South of Cornwall, north of Iberia, across the Cantabrian Gulf from Aquitaine were the Elder
Isles, ranging in size from GwygтАЩs Fang, a jag of black rock most often awash under Atlantic
breakers, to Hybras, the тАШHy-BrasillтАЩ of early Irish chroniclers: an island as large as Ireland
itself.

On Hybras were three notable cities: Avallon, Lyonesse Town and ancient Ys,* along with many
walled towns, old gray villages, castles of many turrets and manor houses in pleasant gardens.

*In primaeval times a land bridge briefly connected the Elder Isles to Old Europe.
According to myth, the first nomad hunters to arrive on Hybras, when they crossed the
Teach tac Teach and looked down along the Atlantic foreshore, discovered the city Ys
already in existence.

The landscapes of Hybras were varied. The Teach tac Teach, a mountain range of high peaks and
upland moors, paralleled the length of the Atlantic foreshore. Elsewhere the landscape was more
gentle, with vistas over sunny downs, wooded knolls, meadows and rivers. A wild woods shrouded the
entire center of Hybras. This was the Forest of Tantrevalles, itself the source of a thousand
fables, where few folk ventured for fear of en chantment. The few who did so, woodcutters and the
like, walked with cautious steps, stopping often to listen. The breathless silence, broken,
perhaps, by a far sweet bird call, was not reassuring in itself and soon they would stop to listen
again.

In the depths of the forest, colors became richer and more intense; shadows were tinged with
indigo or maroon; and who knows what might be watching from across the glade, or perched at the
top of yonder stump?

The Elder Isles had known the coming and going of many peoples: Pharesmians, blue-eyed Evadnioi,
Pelasgians with their maenad priestesses, Danaans, Lydians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Greeks, Celts
from Gaul, Ska from Norway by way of Ireland, Romans, Celts from Ireland and a few Sea Goths. The
wash of so many peoples had left behind a complex detritus: ruined strongholds; graves and tombs;
steles carved with cryptic glyphs: songs, dances, turns of speech, fragments of dialect,
placenames; ceremonies of purport now forgotten, but with lingering flavor. There were dozens of
cults and religions, diverse except that in every case a caste of priests interceded between laity
and divinity. At Ys, steps cut into the stone led down into the ocean to the temple of Atlante;
each month in the dark of the moon priests descended the steps by midnight, to emerge at dawn
wearing garlands of sea flowers. On Dascinet, certain tribes were guided in their rites by cracks
in sacred stones, which none but the priests could read. On Scola, the adjacent island,
worshippers of the god Nyrene poured flasks of their own blood into each of four sacred rivers;
the truly devout sometimes bled themselves pale. On Troicinet, the rituals of life and death were
conducted in temples dedicated to the earth-goddess Gaea. Celts had wandered everywhere across the
Elder Isles, leaving behind not only place names, but Druid sacrifices in sacred groves, and the
тАШMarch of the TreesтАЩ during Beltane. Etruscan priests consecrated their an rogynous divinity
Votumna with ceremonies repulsive and often horrid, while the Danaans introduced the more
wholesome Aryan pantheon. With the Romans came Mithraism, Christianity, Parsh, the worship of
Zoroaster, and a dozen other similar sects. In due course, Irish monks founded a Christian
monastery* on Whanish Isle, near Dahaut below Avallon, which ultimately suffered the same fate as