"David Gemmell - Wolf in Shadow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gemmel David)

dying, I was waiting to be fired, and staff, who had joined my team in good
faith, were facing redundancy. After the fifth large Armagnac I decided to
continue work on the book. I knew I was drunk, and I also knew that the
chances of writ-ing anything worthwhile were pretty negligible. But forcing my
mind into a fantasy world seemed infinitely more appealing than concentrating
on the reality at hand.

The scene I was set to continue had a Nadir scout riding across the
steppes. The intention was to follow him to the top of a hill and have him
gaze down on the awesome army camped on the plain below.

I focused on the typewriter keys and typed the following sen-tences….

The rider paused at the crest of a wooded hill, and gazed down at the
wide, rolling empty lands beneath him. There was no sign of Jerusalem…The
walls of the mind came crashing in as I typed the word Jerusalem, thoughts,
fears and regrets spilling over one another, fighting for space. There
followed a bad hour, which even Arma-gnac could not ease.
 But after midnight I returned to the page and stared down at it. It
called out to me. Who is he, I thought? What is he looking for, this Jerusalem
Man?

And suddenly he was there. Tall and gaunt, seeking a city that had
ceased to exist three hundred years before. A lonely, tortured man on a quest
with no ending, riding through a world of savagery and barbarism.

The story flowed in an instant, and I wrote until after the dawn.

Through all the despair that followed in those next painful months I
found a sanctuary in the company of Jon Shannow. Through his eyes I could see
the world clearly, and understand how important it is to be strong in the
broken places.

As a result Shannow will always be one of my favorite char-acters.

For a while back there he was the best friend I'd ever had.

David A. Gemmell Hastings, 1995


Prologue


The High Priest lifted his bloodstained hands from the corpse and dipped
them in a silver bowl filled with scented water. The blood swirled around the
rose petals floating there, darkening them and glistening like oil. A young
acolyte moved to kneel before the King, his hands out-stretched. The King
leaned forward, placing a large oval stone in his palms. The stone was
red-gold, and veined with thick black streaks. The acolyte carried the stone
to the corpse, laying it on the gaping wound where the girl's heart had been.