"T. H. White - The Once and Future King" - читать интересную книгу автора (White T.H)

"I will give it to other people, King. English people."
"You will say to them in Warwickshire: Eh, he wor a wonderly fine candle?"
"Aye, lad, that I will."
"Then 'tis: Na, Tom, for thee must go right quickly. Thou'St take the best son of a mare that thee kinst
find, and thou wilt ride post into Warwickshire, lad, wi' nowt but the curlew?"
"I will ride post, mate, so that the candle burn."
"Good Tom, then, God bless 'ee. Doant thee ferget thick Bishop of Rochester, afore thou goest."
The little boy kneeled down to kiss his master's handтАФ his surcoat, with the Malory bearings, looking
absurdly new.


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"My lord of England," he said.
Arthur raised him gently, to kiss him on the shoulder.
"Sir Thomas of Warwick," he saidтАФand the boy was gone.
The tent was empty, tawny and magnificent. The wind wailed and the candles guttered. Waiting for the
Bishop, the old, old man sat down at his reading desk. Presently his head drooped forward on the papers.
The greyhound's eyes, catching the candles as she watched him, burned spectrally, two amber cups of
feral light. Mordred's cannonade, which he was to keep up through the darkness until the morning's
battle, began to thud and bump outside. The King, drained of his last effort, gave way to sorrow. Even
when his visitor's hand lifted the tent flap, the silent drops coursed down his nose and fell on the
parchment with regular ticks, like an ancient clock. He turned his head aside, unwilling to be seen,
unable to do better. The flap fell, as the strange figure in cloak and hat came softly in.
"Merlyn?"
But there was nobody there: he had dreamed him in a catnap of old age.
Merlyn?
He began to think again, but now it was as clearly as it had ever been. He remembered the aged
necromancer who had educated himтАФwho had educated him with animals. There were, he remembered,
something like half a million different species of animal, of which mankind was only one. Of course
man was an animalтАФhe was not a vegetable or a mineral, was he? And Merlyn had taught him about
animals so that the single species might learn by looking at the problems of the, thousands. He
remembered the belligerent ants, who claimed their boundaries, and the pacific geese, who did not. He
remembered his lesson from the badger. He remembered Lyo-lyok and the island which they had seen
on their migration, where all those puffins, razorbills, guillemots and kittiwakes had lived together
peacefully, preserving their own kinds of civilization without warтАФbecause they claimed no boundaries.
He saw the problem before him as plain as a map. The fantastic thing about war was that it was fought
about nothingтАФliterally nothing. Frontiers were imaginary lines. There was no visible line between
Scotland and England, although Hodden and Bannockburn had been fought about it. It was geography
which was the causeтАФpolitical geography. It was nothing else. Nations did not need to have the same
kind of civilization, nor the same kind of leader, any more than the puffins and the guillemots did. They
could keep thek own civilizations, like Esquimaux and Hottentots, if they would give each other
freedom of trade and free passage and access to the world. Countries would have to become countiesтАФ
but counties which could keep their own culture and local laws. The imaginary lines on the earth's
surface only needed to be unimagined. The airborne birds skipped them by nature. How mad the

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