"Zimmer,.Paul.Edwin.-.Ingulf.The.MadUC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zimmer Paul Edwin)

The Sea-Elves
THE CITY OF the Sea-Elves stands aloneЧall but unknown in lands of menЧby Y'Gora's northern strand. There come the ships from beyond the world.
And there, one evening, came Ingulf of the Isles after long wandering, as the Twin Suns sank in rainbow splendor. They had risen and set many times on his quest: long had he sifted legend and myth, seeking a clue that would lead him here.
He heard the roar of surf hissing on the shore as he turned his horse's head toward the sea. White towers rose in sight, and the unvisited city lay before him. Sea-wind stirred his copper hair: the salt smell stirred his mind.
Waves of blood poured strongly through his veins: tiny chill thrillings swept over him. All the days and dreary months of searching faded from memory, and instead it was a woman's face he thought of, and the shape of a seal among great waves.
Ages ago, the folk of Tray Ithir that was his home, far away in the long chain of islands east of Y'Gora, had beaten out the harvest with their great flails. But recent centuries had brought raiders from the far north at harvest time, savage servants of
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the Demon-Lords of the icy waste, and so the great flails had found new work to do. So deadly were they at this task that the men of Tray Ithir became far-famed warriors. Generations of the Airarian Emperors, who rule many of the wide-scattered islands east of Y'Gora, as well as the great Airarian peninsula that makes Y'Gora look on a map like a great cat's skull, with the Inner Sea its open mouth, had sought the men of Tray Ithir to bring their war-flails into their armies.
Ingulf, son of Fingold, had followed this path. His father had been sword-master to his clan, and his war-flail and skilled sword-arm won him some small fame in the Emperor's service.
When one raiding-season ended, he found himself in the dull and barren isles of the Scurlmard chain, far to the north of his home, beyond the isles of the Curranach.
The folk of the Scurlmards wilt not hunt seals, for they say that the Sea-People travel in this form.
But Ingulf laughed at such tales.
Boredom came upon him in the Scurlmards. He went hunting alone in his small boat. Hills of water rose and fell about him: the Twin Suns were fiery eyes above the sea. Barren, stony islands appeared and vanished behind restless, blue-green waves.
He was returning to harbor with the few fish he had caught, when a long brown shape skimmed up the side of a rippling wave.
A seal, he thought, and plied his oars. He was skilled at hunting in the water: he crept up on it and laid down the oars and gripped his harpoon.
He stiffened, and raised the long straight shaft. The seal balanced on the crest of a wave. Ingulf rose and threw, and the harpoon flew. It struck further back than he had planned, and the seal wailed in a woman's voice.
His harpoon line tightened in his hand, and his boat was drawn swiftly through the water. A dip in the waves showed him the rocks of a stony little island ahead.
The rope hummed. Black, jagged stone pierced the creamy water on either side, but the seal swam safely through.
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dragging the boat behind, toward a tiny gravel beach. A cave gaped in the cliff above.
A wave lifted the seal and laid her gently on the little beach. Ingulf jerked out his long dirk, ready to leap from the boat; for a seal upon land is easy to kill.
But the brown shape reared up, and the seal-skin seemed to fall away. It was a woman there, crying and tugging with slender white hands at the harpoon in her hip.
As he stared. Ingulf almost lost his life to the sea. Powerful currents seized the boat and whirled it toward the rocks. He seized his paddle and drove the pitching boat to shore.
She let go the spear-shaft then, and tried to escape, but felt, with blood pouring over her white legs.
He leaped from the boat and ran to her side. The ends of the long brown hair that was her only garment were bright with blood. Huge eyes stared at him in wild terror.
He tried to speak soothingly as he wrestled with the harpoon, working the barb loose. Her pain would haunt his nightmares forever.
Had it been her long brown hair he had seen in the water, and thought was a seal? It hung below her waist.
His mind went round and round, numb with guilt. He got the harpoon loose, and she sobbed and screamed with exhaustion while he tried to stop the blood.
That was the beginning of it all, and terrible it was. He bound up her wound as best he might, stuttering helpless words of guilt and sorrow, and made her drink from the wineskin that was slung on his back. She controlled her weeping at last, and gazed at him with eyes that were larger and softer than the eyes of any woman of mortal blood.
But a strange thing it was, that he could never, afterward remember what color those eyes were. Sometimes he seemed to remember that they had been gray as the sea at twilight, and then again they would come into his mind a transparent blue, like the night sky between the stars, or again as brown as her hair, or sometimes golden. . . .
But whatever color they were, he would see those eyes looking at him for the rest of his days.
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He built a fire, and brought from the boat those few fish he had caught, along with his fur-lined cloak to cover her. The Twin Suns settled into the sea. She ate the fish he cooked, and slept wrapped in his cloak, while he sat and piled driftwood on the fire until he fell asleep with his back against the stone.
A time of happiness came with the sunlight into the cave, for then she spoke to him, and her voice in speech seemed more beautiful than any song.
Her name was Airellen, the daughter of Falmoran, and she had never before spoken to a mortal. Something she told him of that strange city by the waves where men do not go, and more of the green mystery of the sea, though all she said was to him a maze of strange names and riddles. But her eyes glowed on him, and he was happy.
He found himself trying to tell her of Tray Ithir and his people, but now they seemed drab and colorless, and his tongue stumbled into silence. Then he tried to tell her of the battles he had seen in the service of the Emperor, but it came to him that he was boasting, and he was silent once more.
Yet he lived as in a fever of happiness, hunting for shellfish in the shallow water, tending the fire each night while she slept.
It came to him more than once that he should take her to Lonnamara in his boat, to the healer there; but when he spoke of this to her, he found himself lost in her wide eyes, while she told some tale of marvels that he could never afterward recall.
The thought faded from his mind. The days passed, and her wound healed, while he served her in a joy that seemed half-dream.
He loved her. He knew that he loved her, and he tried in vain to make himself speak of it. But when her eyes turned upon him, he could not.
Far more swiftly than mortal flesh, her wound healed. A terror came upon him then. Soon she would be able to return to her own people. He tried to picture life without her, and a hostile, empty future rose before him.
In a panic, then, he rushed to tell her of his loveЧand failed, his will drowning in the oceans of her eyes.
Out of her sight, he could think again, and his resolve
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returned. He fell to shaping words into a speech that would make his feelings clear to her, and he rehearsed it again and again to himself as he gathered driftwood on the beach.
But when he tried to say these carefully-chosen words to her, again he found himself silent before those huge and beautiful eyes, while she spoke to him of persons and places that were but a tangle of names he did not know.
He found himself dazed outside the cave, and realized he still had not spoken. He rushed back inside, the vision of the empty world he had foreseen a terror within him, and clenching shut his eyes he forced his lips to moveЧnot in the careful words he had labored on, but wild, stammering words.
Her small breasts moved in a sigh.
"But you are a mortal man," she said. "The old songs of my people say that when a mere handful of decades have passed, your youth and strength and beauty will fall from you, and you will wither like a leaf, and die. 1 have no need of sorrow. Let us part as friends, and let me remember you as you are now."
She rose from where she was sitting, and tried to walk by him to the mouth of the cave. But he, stammering words he could never remember after, seized her arm; thinking only that he could never, ever live without her.