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

“I don’t know,” said Cray. “I’ve never seen a grave.”

“Never seen a grave?” The old man looked at him with bright, incredulous eyes. “Where have you lived that no one dies, young sir?”

“I have lived with my mother,” said Cray. “Just the two of us, and I have never known anyone who died.”

“But graves… surely the graves of your ancestors were somewhere nearby.”

“None that I knew of, good sir.” He did not mention that sorcerers, unless killed considerably before the normal span of their long lives, merely crumbled to dust and blew away at death. His grandmother, dead more than half a century, was part of the forest soil, and when Cray was a child one of his fancies was that she lived in every tree, in every herb, in every mushroom that sprouted there. His mother spoke of her

sometimes, and Cray knew what she looked like from a tapestry that Delivev had woven before he was born.

Nor had he ever seen a grave in the webs. Delivev had no interest in graveyards.

“You may see a few this day then,” said the old man. “And every one dug by these hands.” He held them up, and they were knobby with age but still calloused. He rose.

“Come. Come along.”

Cray shrugged and followed him, glancing back once at Sepwin, who stayed still by the fire.

“I’ve seen enough graves for my taste,” said Sepwin, and he stirred the soup with a clean stick.

Cray and the old man walked through the untended field, wading through coarse grass and grain gone wild that reached their waists and higher. Almost at the trees on the far side, they emerged from the tangle to a small open space, where the greenery was clipped short and scattered with wild flowers. Here were three graves, neatly mounded hillocks of earth side by side. The first was marked by a large stone cut into a rough slab, with symbols against evil incised deeply in the weathered surface.

“My eldest son,” the old man said.

The second grave had two stones at its head, one large, one small, with carvings in proportion.

“My wife is there,” said the old man, pointing. “And the baby, too. I thought she would not like to be separated from him.”

But Cray’s eyes tracked quickly past the first two graves, to the third. Its marker stone was rougher hewn than the others, rounded, more like an ordinary boulder. And tilted against it, their lower parts buried, anchored in the grass-grown earth, were a sword and shield. Both were rusty from long exposure to the elements, and much of the shield’s paint had weathered away, but still there was enough left upon it that Cray could make out the bearings of its owner: three red lances interlocked on a white field. He stood before the grave and stared down at that shield, and the old man babbled behind him, unheeded.

“It is a moving experience, is it not?” the old man was saying when Cray could hear his words once more. “I weep, too, every time I come to tend them. I miss her, though she’s been gone so long.”

Cray blinked and realized that his cheeks and lashes were wet with salty tears. “His name,” he said slowly, “was Mellor.”

The old man came close to him. “You knew the man? But this happened many years

ago, and you are very young.”

“Fifteen years ago.”

“Fifteen?” He rubbed at his bearded chin with one hand, then ticked off the years on those fingers. “Perhaps fifteen,” he said after some moments. “Or fourteen. Since my last daughter left my house, I have not kept a careful count of the passing years.”

“He was bound south for Falconhill from the East March.”

“He was indeed! Bound for the hold of our very own lord with some business from the East March!”

Cray knelt by the grave and laid his hands upon it, as if some essence could pass from the corpse resting within to himself. He felt only grass beneath his palms, and the coarser texture of herbs scattered among the shorter growth. He touched the shield, the sword, and flakes of rust came away in his hand.