"Kerr, Katharine - Deverry 02 - Darkspell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

Acknowledgments

A thousand thanks to all my friends and relations, too numerous to list, who have had to put up with my fits of absent-mindedness, compulsive writing stints, and downright obsession with this imaginary world. Most of all, though, my thanks go to my husband, Howard Kerr, who has to live with me, after all, when I’m working.


A Note on the Pronunciation of Deverry Words

The language spoken in Deverry is a P-Celtic language. Although closely related to Welsh, Breton, and Cornish, it is by no means identical to any of these actual languages and should never be taken as such.
Vowels are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.
A as in father when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in/ar, when short.
0 as bone when long; as in pot when short.
W as the oo in spook when long; as in root when short. Y as the i in machine when long; as the e in butter when short. E as in pen.
I as in pin.U as in pun.
Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables, short in unstressed. Y is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long, whether that syllable is stressed or not.
Diphthongs have one consistent pronunciation.
AE as the a in mane.
AI as in aisle.
AU as the ow in how.
EO as a combination of eh and oo.
EW as in Welsh, a combination of eh and oo.
IE as in pier.
OE as the oy in boy.
UI as the North Welsh wy, a combination of oo and ee.

Note that OI is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in the name Benoic (BEHN-oh-ik).
Consonants are as in English, with these exceptions:
C is always hard as in cat.
G is always hard as in get.
DD is the voiced th as in breathe, but the voicing is considerably more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound as in breath. Note well: dd and th are always considered single letters.
R is well and truly rolled.
RH is a voiceless R, approximately pronounced as if it were spelled hr. The distinction is a subtle one, and in Eldidd tends to be increasingly ignored.
DW, GW, and TW are single sounds, as in twit, most of the time; but there are exceptions.
Y is never a consonant.
I before a vowel may be consonantal, particularly at the beginning of words and in the plural ending -ion (pronounced yawn).
Doubled consonants are both sounded clearly. Note that DD and RR are considered single consonants, as are the two ‘m’s’ in the name of the god Wmm.
Accent is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place names are often exceptions to this rule.

On the whole, I have transcribed both Elvish and Bardek-ian names and words according to the above system of orthography, which is quite adequate to the Bardekian, at least. As for Elvish, in a work of this sort it would be both confusing and overly pedantic to use the full apparatus by which scholars try to represent this most subtle and nuanced of tongues. To the average human ear, for instance, distinctions such as those between A, A, and A are lost in the hearing. Why then should we try to distinguish them in print? The reader should, however, remember that Elvish words are accented quite differently than Deverrian and Bardekian ones. Since Elvish is an agglutinative language, the various components of a name may receive stress according to their meaning rather than to their place in the pattern of syllables. Canbaramelim, for instance, which is composed of the morphemes for rough + name marker + river, is pronounced CAHN-BAHR-ah-MEH-lim.


Prologue Winter, 1062

Every light casts a shadow. So does the dweomer. Some men choose to stand in the light; others, in the darkness. Be ye always aware that where you stand is a matter of choice, and let not the shadow creep over you unawares . . .
The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

They met deep in the Innerlands in a place where only those who had mastered the heart of the dweomer could go. In various towns in the kingdom of Deverry, their physical bodies lay asleep in trance, leaving their minds free to assume a new form and travel far to the ancient grove of oaks that stood under a dim, pleasant sun. For a thousand years so many dweomer-masters had imagined this grove, had pictured it with trained minds and discussed its details among themselves, that now the images lived by themselves in the astral plane. They were always there when those who knew how came to them.
Those who met had chosen simple images for their minds to wear. Their faces looked like their physical ones, but their bodies were thin, curiously attenuated, and dressed in a stylized version of ordinary clothes, the men in white brigga and shirts, the women in white ankle-length dresses. There was no particular significance to the color white; it simply took less energy to maintain than bright colors. One at a time they appeared in the grove until at last the full company of thirty-two stood there, drifting above the insubstantial grass and waiting for the man who’d called this meeting to speak.
He was tall, quite old, with a shock of thick white hair and piercing blue eyes. Although he held the title of the Master of the Aethyr, he preferred to be known as Nevyn, a name that held a jest, because it meant ‘no one’. Beside him stood a short, slender man with gray hair and dark eyes that dominated his face. His name was Aderyn, and technically he had no right to come to the grove, because his Wyrd lay not with his own humankind, but with the elven race, the Elcyion Lacar, who lived to the west of Deverry. Yet he had testimony to offer about the strange events that they were meeting to discuss.
‘We’re all here, then?’ Nevyn said at last. ‘Now, you’ve all heard somewhat about what happened this summer.’