"Janny Wurts - Wayfinder(2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wurts Janny)

this," to the fisherman who had been boasting the loudest. "You will not be repeating
this tale to any traders, nor be offering my service to outsiders. This is my bargain
for Juard's life."
Silence fell with the suddenness of a thunderclap. Surf and the snap of flame
remained, and a ring of stupefied faces unfamiliarly edged with hostility. "Which of
us made any such bargain?" shouted someone from the sidelines.
The Wayfinder's peaked brows rose. "Ciondo is my witness, and here is my
warning. For yourselves, you may ask of me as you will. The guiding and ward of
your fleet I shall do as I can; but let none beyond this village ever know that I am
in'am shealdi. Say nothing, or sorrow will come of it."
Finished speaking, or perhaps too weary to stay standing, the Wayfinder
strode out of the pack. He left all the village muttering and wondering as he moved in
slow steps toward the path. On the chill sands outside the torchlight, Sabin watched
him vanish in the darkness under the pines. She did not follow; nor did she feel
moved to join the villagers. The waking dream had touched her. Curiosity no longer
drove her to discuss the stranger Kala sheltered.
"Was he a felon, to want such secrecy?" one good-wife muttered from the
sidelines.
Ciondo replied in indignation. "Does it matter?" Then good sense prevailed
over argument, and Kala scolded the gawkers roundly for keeping poor Juard from
his bed.
A month passed, and seven days. Juard recovered his health and returned to
fishing on the sloop. The Wayfinder who had brought his recovery took a longer
time to mend. Kala pressed food and comforts on him constantly, until he
complained of her coddling. Unlike anybody else, she listened, and left him alone.
His white hair grew out its natural color, a golden, honey-brown, until Sabin sitting in
her chair seat on the cliff-side could no longer pick him out from the villagers who
manned the sloops. She saw him seldom, and spoke with him not at all. Winding the
skeins of wool and stringing the looms in her father's craft shop in furious
concentration, she avoided walking the beach. Since the night she forgot her jacket,
she could not bear to watch the combers. She heard them, felt them, even indoors
with her ears filled with the clack of shuttle and loom--the thunder of what might be
hooves, and the tumble of white, upflung spray that pounded the beaches in
procession. She swept cut threads from the floor, and helped her mother bake, and
each night begged her sleep to show her silence.
It did not. She misplaced socks and tools, and once, let the fire burn out. The
waking world came to seem as a dream, and herself, strangely separate, adrift. She
was scolded more often for stargazing, and seemed more than ever to care less.
The Wayfinder laughed in the tavern at night, accepted, but with a reverence
that marked him apart. Two boats he saved from ruin when storms caused shoaling
off the reefs. Another smack was recovered with a damaged compass after squall
winds blew it astray. No one knowingly broke the Wayfinder's faith, but his
presence loomed too large to shelter. Sabin understood this, her hands fallen idle
over wool she was meant to be spinning. She twisted the red-dyed fibers aimlessly,
knowing: there were traders who had heard of Juard's loss, and who saw him back
among the men. They asked questions. Driven by balked curiosity, they pressured
and cajoled, and won themselves no satisfaction.
The silence itself caused talk.
Summer passed. The winds shifted and blew in cold from the northeast, and
the fleet changed quarter to follow the shoals of fish. The looms in the weaver's