"Tad Williams - The Burning Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

house of a sour old man, for one of my father's sisters had also lost her husband, and the
youngest had been kept at home, unmarried, to care for her father in his dotage.
I believe that had even the humblest of fishermen courted my mother, she would have looked upon
him kindly, as long as he had a house of his own and no living relatives. But instead a man who
has made the entire age tremble came to call.

'What is he like?' Tellarin once asked me. 'Tell me about your stepfather.'
'He is your lord and commander' I smiled. 'What can I tell you that you do not know?'
Tell me what he says when he is in his house, at his table, what he does.' Tellarin looked at me
then, his long face suddenly boyish and surprised. 'Hah! It feels like sacrilege even to wonder!'
'He is just a man', I told him, and rolled my eyes. Such silly things men feel about other men -
that this one is so large and important, while they themselves are so small! 'He eats, he sleeps,
he breaks wind. When my mother was alive, she used to say that he took up more room in a bed than
any three others might, because he thrashed so, and talked aloud in his sleep.' I made my
stepfather sound ordinary on purpose, because I did not like it when Tellarin seemed as interested
in him as he was in me.
My Nabbanai soldier became serious then. 'How it must have grieved him when your mother died. He
must have loved her very much.'
As if it had not grieved me! I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes again, and instead told
him, with all the certainty of youth, 'I do not think he loved her at all.'

My mother once said that when my stepfather and his household first appeared across the
meadowlands, riding north towards the Kingslake, it was as though the heavenly host itself had
descended to earth. Trumpets heralded their approach, drawing people from every town as though to
witness a pilgrimage passing, or the procession of a saint's relic. The knights' armour and lances
were polished to a sparkle, and their lord's heron crest gleamed in gold thread on all the tall
banners. Even the horses of the Nabban-men were larger and prouder than our poor Erkynlandish
ponies. The small army was followed by sheep and cattle in herds, and by dozens and dozens of
wagons and oxcarts, a train so vast that their rutted path is still visible on the face of the
land threescore years later.
I was a child, though, and saw none of it - not then. Within my grandfather's hall, I heard only
rumours, things whispered by my aunts and my mother over their sewing. The powerful lord who had
come was a Nabbanai nobleman, they reported, called by many Sulis the Apostate. He claimed that he
came in peace, and wanted only to make a home for himself here beside the Kingslake. He was an
exile from his own country - a heretic, some claimed, driven forth by the Lector under threat of
excommunication because of his impertinent questions about the life of Usires Aedon, our blessed
Ransomer. No, he had been forced from his home by the conniving of the escritors, said others.
Angering a churchman is like treading on a serpent, they said.
Mother Church still had an unsolid grip on Erkynland in those days, and even though most had been
baptized into the Aedonite faith, very few of the Lake People trusted the Sancellan Aedonitis.
Many called it 'that hive of priests', and said that its chief aim was not God's work, but
increasing its own power.
Many still think so, but they no longer speak ill of the church where strangers can hear them.
I know far more of these things today than I did when they happened. I understand much and much,
now that I am old and everyone in my story is dead. Of course, I am not the first to have
travelled this particular sad path. Understanding always comes too late, I think.
Lord Sulis had indeed fallen out with the church, and in Nabban the church and the state were so
closely tied, he had made an enemy of the Imperator in the Sancellan Mahistrevis as well, but so
powerful and important was the family of my stepfather-to-be that he was not imprisoned or
executed, but instead strongly encouraged to leave Nabban. His countrymen thought he took his