"Janny Wurts - That way lies Camelot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wurts Janny)

beach. The moon went and came again. Out on the reefs, the high-
flying spindrift carved up by the rocks tossed like the manes of
white horses; great herds there seemed to be, galloping with arched
necks, the surf-roll becoming the thunder of churning hooves. Sabin
forgot the folly of the daydreams that had forced her out of bed. As
if someone's voice had addressed her, she stopped very still and
stared. For a second the horses seemed real. There, the red flare of
nostrils in the moon-whitened planes of wedged faces,
and now, a ringing neigh on the wind that tore past her ears.
Impossible, she insisted, and yet-
A cloud scudded over the moon. Her wonder vanished and she chided
herself. There was nothing. Only the tide-swept sand of the beach and
herself, a scarecrow figure of a girl with mussed hair and no sense,
gawping at a span of wild waters. The village idiot knew horses did
not run in the sea. Sabin shivered and felt cold. The dory lay
beached above the tideline a brisk walk distant up the beach. She
turned that way, determined to fetch back her jacket without another
lapse into silliness.
But before she had gone half the distance, something else caught
her eye in the surf. Not a horse, but a dark clot of rags that at
first she mistook for flotsam. Then the crest of a wave rolled it
over, and she saw a man. He was floundering to keep his face above
water, and was only a hairsbreadth from drowning.
Fear and memory drove her. She spun and plunged into the sea.
Cousin Juard had been lost to the waves, ripped from the decks of her
uncle's boat during the fury of a storm. As the racking, retching
cougl~s of the man who struggled reached her, she wondered if Juard
had died as miserably, his body bent into spasms as the cold salt
water stung his lungs.
Then the swirl of a comber cascaded over her boot-tops and foamed
up around her chest, and her gasping shudder killed thought. The
castaway borne along by the tide tumbled under and the weight of him
slammed her in the knees.
She dropped, clutching at a shoulder whose shirt was all tatters,
and skin underneath that was ice. As the rough sands scoured under
her shins, she hooked his elbow, and braced against the drag of the
ebb.

13
Her head broke water. Through a plastering of hair, Sabin huffed what
she hoped was encouragement. 'This way. The beach.'
His struggles were clumsy. She labored to raise him, distracted
by a chink of metal: iron, she saw in the flash of bared moonlight.
He was lettered in rusted chains, the skin of both wrists torn raw
from their chafing.
'Mother of mercy,' she blasphemed. He had found his knees, an old
man, white-haired and wasted of body. His head dangled with fatigue.
She said, 'Nobody could swim pulled down by all this chain!'
'Didn't,' he husked; he had no breath to speak. He thrashed in an
attempt to rise, and fell again as the water hit and dashed in