"Tad Williams - Memory, Sorrow & Thorn 2 Stone Of Farewell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

noon, the crunch of his footsteps a near-silent drumbeat accompanying the
skirling wind.

/(i"5 no wonder the townspeople have fled to the keep, he thought, shivering.
All around him gaped the black idiot-mouths of roofs and walls staved in

XVI

Tad Williams

by the weight of snow. But inside the castle, under the protection of stone
and great timbers, there they must be safe. Fires would be burning, and
red, cheerful facesЧsinners' faces, he reminded himself scornfully: damned,
heedless sinners' facesЧwould gather around him and marvel that he
had walked all this way through the freakish storm.

It is Yuven-month, is it not? Had his memory suffered so, that he could

not remember the month?

But of course it was. Two full moons ago it had been springЧa little

cold, perhaps, but that was nothing to a Rimmersman like Hengfisk,
reared in the chill of the north. No, that was the freakish thing, of course,
that it should be so deadly cold, the ice and snow flying, in YuvenЧthe

first month of summer.
Hadn't Brother Langrian refused to leave the abbey, and after all Hengfisk

had done to nurse him back to health? "It's more than foul weather, Brother,"
Langrian had said. "It's a curse on God's entire creation. It's the Day of

Weighing-Out come in our lifetimes."

Ah, that was well enough for Langrian. If he wanted to stay in the burned
wrack of Saint Hoderund's abbey, eating berries and such from the forestЧ
and how much fruit would there be anyway, in such unseasonable cold?
Чthen he could do as he pleased. Brother Hengfisk was no fool. Naglimund
was the place to go. Old Bishop Anodis would welcome Hengfisk. The
bishop would admire the monk's clever eye for what he had seen, the
stories that Hengfisk could tell of what had happened at the abbey, the
unseasonable weather. The Naglimunders would welcome him in, feed
him, ask him questions, let him sit before their warm fire. . . .

But they must know about the cold, mustn't they? Hengfisk thought dully as
he pulled his ice-crackling robe closer about him. He was in the very
shadow of the wall now. The white world he had known for so many
days and weeks seemed to have come to an ending, a precipice that
vanished into stony nothingness. That is, they must know about the snow and
all. That's why they^ve all left the town and moved into the keep. It's the