"Dunsany, Lord - collection - A Dreamer's Tales- And Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

And the young man took off the gear of his head, and became downcast, and he
knew that he spake with kings, yet he answered:
"By this spear, she is more beautiful than the Sea."
And all the while the Princess stared at him, knowing him to be a hunter of
gariachs.
Then the king of Arizim said to the watcher by the pool:
"If thou wilt go up Poltarnees and come back, as none have come, and report
to us what lure or magic is in the Sea, we will pardon thy blasphemy, and
thou shalt have the Princess to wife and sit among the Council of Kings."
And gladly thereunto the young man consented. And the Princess spoke to him,
and asked him his name. And he told her that his name was Athelvok, and
great joy arose in him at the sound of her voice. And to the three kings he
promised to set out on the third day to scale the slope of Poltarnees and to
return again, and this was the oath by which they bound him to return:
"I swear by the Sea that bears the worlds away, by the river of Oriathon,
which mean call Ocean, and by the gods and their tiger, and by the doom of
the worlds, that I will return again to the Inner Lands, having beheld the
Sea."
And that oath he swore with solemnity that very night in one of the temples
of the Sea, but the three kings trusted more to the beauty of Hilnaric even
than to the power of the oath.
The next day Athelvok came to the palace of Arizim with the morning, over
the fields to the East and out of the country of Toldees, and Hilnaric came
out along her balcony and met him on the terraces. And she asked him if he
had ever slain a gariach, and he said that he had slain three, and then he
told her how he had killed his first down by the pool in the wood. For he
had taken his father's spear and gone down to the edge of the pool, and had
lain under the azaleas there waiting for the stars to shine, by whose first
light the gariachs go to the pools to drink; and he had gone too early and
had had long to wait, and the passing hours seemed longer than they were.
And all the birds came in that home at night, and the bat was abroad, and
the hour of the duck went by, and still n o gariach came down to the pool;
and Athelvok felt sure that none would come. And just as this grew to a
certainty in his mind the thicket parted noiselessly and a huge bull gariach
stood facing him on the edge of the water, and his great horns swept out
sideways from his head, and at the ends curved upwards, and were four
strides in width from tip to tip. And he had not seen Athelvok, for the
great bull was on the far side of the little pool, and Athelvok cold not
creep round to him for fear of meeting the wind (for the gariachs, who can
see little in the dark forests, rely on hearing and smell). But he devised
swiftly in his mind while the bull stood there with head erect just twenty
strides from him across the water. And the bull sniffed the wind cautiously
and listened, then lowered his great head down to the pool and drank. At
that instant Athelvok leapt into the water and shot forward through its
weedy depths among the stems of the strange flowers that floated upon broad
leaves on the surface. And Athelvok kept his spear out straight before him,
and the fingers of his left hand he held rigid and straight, not pointing
upwards, and so did not come to the surface, but was carried onward by the
strength of his spring and passed unentangled through the stems of the
flowers. When Athelvok jumped into the water the bull must have thrown his