"Nancy Etchemendy - The River Temple" - читать интересную книгу автора (Etchemendy Nancy)

“Yes. Perhaps I am, too,” said Mera.

***

My friend, though Handred was a strange place, we were in some ways like any other folk. In the
winter when the cold wind blew, we gathered about our fires, like others of our kind. Around
those fires, many tales were told.

It was said that the Temple of Handred was the handiwork of Makna. It was said that he
constructed it in the dim beginnings of the world, before the Great Drought, as a monument to the
One God Feder and also as a prison for his evil enemy Radna. No mortal could have built the
temple. Its walls are made of great sheets of smooth stone from some unknown quarry. And
beneath its upper structures lies an earthwork of incomprehensible vastness.

Before we found The Book, I believed those tales as everyone did. But the temple was not in truth
built as a prison. Many affairs of the world I do not understand, but I know what it means to serve
a master. Sometimes I think that great Makna was in fact the servant of Radna, that he built the
temple because Radna demanded it.

***

Mera was ill for many weeks after Arain went to the temple. The physicians let me see her only because
she asked for me often. Old Mathias understood about the work I left undone.

Mera's face and the backs of her hands were cruelly burned and covered with blisters. For a long time
we did not know if she would ever see again. A raging fever seized her, and she could not eat. Far worse
was the sickness of her heart, though she did not speak of it. She did not ask for Arain until delirium at
last overcame her. Then in her ravings she cried out our sister's name again and again. I was afraid that
she would die. I was in anguish, for it seemed to me that both of my sisters were slipping away before my
very eyes. And so, after a time, I gathered my courage and went to the Temple of Handred to find Arain.

It was a very long walk for a hot summer day, and even though the road ran along the green verge of the
Umbya, I was tired and drenched when at last I stood before the dark wooden gates of the temple. I had
never been so close to them before, and I did not know how to gain entrance. It was a frightening place,
a dead place, eerie and foreign. Nothing grew nearby; even birds seemed to shun it. There were no trees,
no grasses; only bare, hard soil and black rock, with dreary, windowless buildings rearing among them
like ancient gray monsters.

I could find no knocker or bell chain, and my fists made only a small sound like moths on the thick wood
of the gates. But I was young, and with little enough trouble I scaled the mud brick wall and let myself
down into a broad courtyard. Directly opposite me stood a smooth, gray building with a flat roof and
towering doors of green, pitted copper. There was writing incised on the doors, but I could not read it. I
could make no sense of the characters, though they seemed familiar in some strange way. They had been
there longer than I dared to guess. Perhaps Makna himself had graven them.

Once again I found no knocker, and this time I was at a loss about how to proceed. The courtyard was
deserted. There was no one to be seen.

All at once a voice came from behind me. “What do you want, boy?”