"Sara Douglass - Redemption 3 - Crusader" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

There was a silence.
"We must ask ourselves a question," Goldman said. "What is it that remains within us of Artor the
Plough God?"
Another silence.
"Faraday," DareWing said, his voice now nearly a death whisper, "of all of us here, you have been
the only one who has been thoroughly taught in the ways of Artor the Ploughman. I only fought
against it, and Goldman ..."
"Was but a boy of twelve when Azhure ran Artor into his grave," Goldman said. "Faraday, what can
you tell us?"
Faraday sat in silence for a while, remembering her childhood lessons in the Way of the Plough, and
her allegiance to, and love for, Artor the Ploughman. The months, months that, in all, amounted
to years, she'd spent studying the Book of Field and Furrow. How blind I was, she thought.
But the faith of the Plough was so comforting. Why?
"We loathed and feared the landscape," she eventually said, "and Artor gave us a face
and a name for that fear. Untamed landscape, mountain, forest and marsh, was the haunt of evil
creatures — the Forbidden — who were undoubtedly Planning to swarm over all that was good
and beautiful ... all over us."
DareWing's mouth curled in a bitter smile, and he turned his head aside.
"Having defined our fear — the wild landscape and all that lived within it — we felt comforted, and
so we took to the forests with our axes, and to the mountains with our armies, and to the marshes with
our engineers, and we pushed back the wild landscape as far as we could. We tamed the earth and made
it our slave."
"We enslaved it with the plough," Gwendylyr said.
"Yes," Faraday said, "with the plough, and the neat square fields, and the straight and
tightly-controlled furrow."
"'Furrow wide, furrow deep'," Goldman said. "I remember my father saying that constantly."
"Must we make amends?" Gwendylyr asked.
Faraday looked to Dare Wing. "Must we?"
"No," he eventually said. "Not as such. The earth does not require 'amends'."
"It merely requires us to let go our hatred and our fear," Goldman said.
"But I don't hate and fear the landscape!" Leagh said.
"There is still something deep within each of us," Faraday said, "that corrupts us. It is the legacy of a
thousand generations of unthinking worship of Artor. We must let that corruption go."
"How?" Leagh said. She looked about at the other witches in the circle, then down at DareWing. He
looked worse than she'd ever seen him, and Leagh realised that they must correct whatever was wrong
very shortly.
Faraday smiled. "I think I know," she said, and in the ploughed field DragonStar raised his
head and smiled also.
"We still fear some aspect of the landscape," Faraday said. "All of us. We must confront the fear,
and let it go."
"But —" Gwendylyr began.
"We all fear some aspect of the landscape," Faraday said again, and looked at Gwendylyr steadily.
"All of us."
"I know what I fear," DareWing said, but Faraday would not let him finish, either.
She stopped him with a gentle hand, leaving her chair to kneel beside him. "DareWing, I
think I know what you fear, and I think I know how strong that fear is."
Faraday grinned, but sadly. "No wonder you have ground fever." Then she raised her head and
looked at the other three, keeping her hand on DareWing's shoulder. "We must confront our
fears first, and then, stronger, be ready to support Dare Wing. Goldman?"
"What? Oh ... I, ah ..." Goldman lapsed into silence, his eyes unfocused, then his mouth thinned and