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

“He was my father,” Cray said, and he closed his eyes and curled his fingers into the grave mound, into the rich black soil beneath the grass. Of a sudden, the chain was heavy on his body, and he could not rise against its weight for a long, long time.

Beside him, Gildrum stood silent, his lips closed over toothless gums. He wanted to touch the kneeling youth; he wanted to take him in his arms and hold him close, but he held himself aloof instead, as a stranger would, leaving Cray alone in grief over a lie.

The demon had planned the simulated death well, thinking that Delivev would find some way to track her lover when he did not return. The victorious foe, a hulking knight in black armor, had been an illusion, the battle realistically wild, the witnesses frightened flesh and blood. But Delivev had not traced her lover, and in the years that followed the event, the witnesses had trickled away through marriage and death, until the hut lay abandoned, the fields overgrown, the graves lost in weeds and wild flowers.

Sitting on the high stool in Rezhyk’s workshop, Gildrum had known that Cray was approaching the place, following the innkeeper’s directions. With little time to spare, she had begun to voice a certain personal dissatisfaction to her master, a certain discontent with her own accomplishments. The steel plates, she had said, would be more easily translated if there were more of them, and so she offered to return to Ushar and search onward. She hinted, even, that she could almost guess where others might be found, and her arguments were so earnest and persuasive that Rezhyk agreed and gave the

command she sought.

Gildrum had not lied to its master—the demon fully intended to return to Ushar, and it did have a notion of where to search next. But knowing that it would not be expected back at Ringforge soon, it went elsewhere first. It transformed the abandoned homestead into a place where an elderly man might live, for Rezhyk had given his servant that form once. If repaired the hut and cleared a patch around the structure, trimmed the sides of the road and tended the graves. Then it caused Cray’s horse to go lame. If Cray had not stopped at the hut of his own volition, Gildrum would have contrived to go out into the road after him.

Cray stood up at last, and he gathered the shield and sword in his arms, wrenching them from the earth that anchored them. “These belong to me now,” he said.

“I understand, young sir,” said Gildrum. “It is only right that his kin should know what became of him.” And to himself, he said, Tell her, my son. Tell her, and both of you will be free of someone who never existed. He watched Cray walk stiffly through the tall wild grain, toward the hut, and before he followed he allowed himself to sigh so quietly that the youth could not hear. But I, he thought, I shall never be free of you.

“Master Feldar,” Cray called hoarsely, “we shall not be going to Falconhill after all.”



She knew something was wrong when she stepped past the threshold of the chamber where the tapestry wove itself.. The whole room was dim, as if curtains of thick gauze veiled the bare windows, and the air was a heavy miasma that seemed to roll into the lungs like syrup. A thousand terrible thoughts filled her brain as she crossed the floor, images of Cray lying broken in some foreign land, robbed, tortured, dead. Even as she touched the cloth, tears were streaming from her eyes, and she could hear the blood of fear rushing in her ears. As her fingers met the threads, the shock of grief invaded her flesh, rising in her arms like poison from a snakebite. She shivered with ague and fell to the floor, powerless to move, her hands still clutching the cloth. She scarcely needed to see the bearings that the tapestry had pictured, the lances interlocked; she knew her son too well to doubt the source of that emotion. The knowledge she had never wanted was hers now, and the pain that it brought was fiercer by far than any she had ever known in so many years of uncertainty. She keened, harshly, brokenly, until her throat was afire, and even then she did not cease.

Slowly, her creatures joined her, the spiders and snakes creeping close to her prostrate form, the vines sliding in the window, the birds lighting on her shoulders and hips to peck at the feathers of her clothing, at her hair, her ears. Only the pony did not come, locked in its stall near the garden, but it sensed the pall that flowed from that room, and it whinnied its uneasiness. After a long time, she heard it, and she rose, heavy with the age she had never felt before, and went out to comfort it.





CHAPTER SEVEN


« ^ »

When he saw her in the web, Cray perceived some change in his mother. The soft, pale plumage she had always favored for her garments had been replaced by glossy raven feathers, and in contrast her skin seemed ashen. She sat too still and straight upon the velvet coverlet, only her fingers moving, the slender needles poised in their grasp twitching rhythmically upon some half-completed knitting. She did not smile, not even the sad smile that he knew so well, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes, as if she had been awake far too long.

“I know what you found, my son,” she said. “You need not speak the words. What will you do now?”

“I’ll go to the East March, Mother. He swore fealty to its lord, and I shall do the same.

Surely they will accept his son.”

“I don’t know what ordinary mortals will accept,” she said.

“Well, there’s no point in going on to Falconhill now.”

“No. No point. But the East March is far.”

“Other places are farther.”

She looked down at her knitting. “I suppose it is your proper destination now.”