"Sorcerer's Son" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phyllis Eisenstein)

“He did. He said, when his duty was done. Perhaps there was more than just the message itself. He never wished to speak of it, and I didn’t press him.” She was working on another tapestry now, with Cray as its central figure, but he was growing so fast that it no longer portrayed the Cray standing before her. “I will wait here and raise you, my son, waiting.” She smiled sadly. “I never had better plans, before he came to me.”

In a small voice, Cray said, “Do you think he’s dead, Mother?”

She sighed. “I don’t want to think that, Cray.”

“Well, what else could have happened to him?”

“Perhaps he found some other woman he could love more than he loved me.”

“More than you?” He threw his arms around her and hugged her tight. “How could

anyone love someone else more than you?”

She kissed her son. “Someday, you may love someone more than you love me, and you will understand.”

“Never!”

“Don’t say never, Cray, not with a long life ahead of you.”

He looked into her eyes. “Why don’t you try to find him, Mother?”

“It would be difficult after so many years.”

“You could try”

She shook her head. “No. I told myself once that I wouldn’t do that, and I have not changed my mind. He has some good reason for not returning; whether it be death or another woman, I have no desire to know.”

With a new and heavier wooden blade, Cray practiced swordplay against a tree in the garden and then, when he learned a few of his mother’s tricks, against a moving, man-shaped bundle of cloth. It dodged and ducked among the flowers, bucking a latticework wooden shield against him, occasionally tapping at him with a branch covered in leather braid. He had some trouble controlling its movements, but that was to the good, to his mind, because it made the bundle an unpredictable adversary. Unfortunately, it had a tendency to fall limp to the ground during Cray’s moments of intense concentration on his own swordsmanship; when that happened too often, he went back to the tree.

He practiced riding, too, on a pony his mother acquired from another sorcerer whose passion was four-footed creatures; she traded a fine tapestry that her son might gallop about the forest with only a few spiders to keep watch over him. With a willow withe as a lance, he charged imaginary foes, and when he returned to Spinweb’s sanctuary, he was as sweat-cloaked as his steed.

In time he asked for a real sword and a real shield, a helm, chain mail, and a man’s horse. He was twelve years old.

His mother rose from her weaving, hands on her hips. “Don’t you think, Cray, that you have played this game long enough? It is time for you to settle down to sorcery.”

He leaned upon the stick that served him as sword, both hands upon its wooden hilt. “It is no game. Mother. I wish to be a knight.”

Her mouth hardened into a white line. “I have indulged you out of love. I thought that while you played childish games your body would grow strong and straight; And it has. I never dreamed that your mind would not do the same.”

“Mother, there is no shame in being a knight.”

“There is death! If your father is dead, then knighthood was his killer!”

“Mother, I am not suited to the sorcerous life.”

“Why not? You do it well, the little you have learned. There is far more to know.”

He looked down at his hands and shook his head. “It holds no interest for me.”