"Stephen Lawhead - Celtic Crusades 01 - The Iron Lance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lawhead Stephen)

position, clutching the metal rod, and gulping air like a fish caught on dry
land.
The floor beneath me trembles; I feel the vibration seeping up through the
stone floor and into my bones. My mouth is dry and tastes of sour milk. The
sweat is pouring from me now. I press my head back against the solid rock and
feel my poor heart thumping away wildly in my chest.
This is how I will die, I think.
There are dancing spots before my eyes - like fireflies, these errant beams
glint and fade, appearing and reappearing in the vast emptiness of the cavern.
Unlike fireflies, however, they are swarming, growing larger, gathering more
substance. I see colours: bold, vibrant, shocking in their intensity. The
light is growing stronger, coalescing into spheres.
It must be the last eruption of a dying brain, but no ... I can see some of
the cavern chamber illuminated in the light of the ever-shifting spheres. One
of them drifts close to me, shedding a gentle glow of light over me. What is
more, I can see something moving inside the sphere: the dim shapes of human
figures.
The images inside the sphere are shifting, changing, filling my vision. It is
all I can see now, and the light is growing stronger. Without warning the
vision breaks over me. A sudden burst of light, and all at once, the cavern is
ablaze with sparkling images. They fly past my dazzled eyes in a flurry of
beams, a veritable blizzard of brilliance, each image a burning spark striking
deep into the soft tissue of my brain. Each blazing particle is part of a
greater whole, merging and coalescing as they accumulate in my mind.
Individual fragments are swallowed in the gradually emerging whole, and I
begin to see - not broken images now, but a portrait entire. With the
crystalline clarity of a dream, I see it all. More, I behold. I have become
part of the dream, living it even as it is played out in my mind.
Still, the dazzling fragments, these scintillating shards of dream, fly at me,
piercing my senses, embedding themselves deep in my perception. I am
defenceless before the onslaught. I can but gape and surrender to the dizzying
torrent. But there is so much! The scenes cascade into my consciousness, and I
am a man drowning in the onrushing flood.
I can derive no sense or understanding of what I see; the dream is too vast,
too chaotic, too wild. It is all I can do to take it in. Yet, there is meaning
here. I feel it. This dream is no hollow hallucination, the shadow-play of a
drugged and fevered brain. Indeed, irresistibly, I am impressed with a grave
and terrible certainty that the tilings I am seeing, however bizarre and
chaotic they may seem, actually happened. The dream is authentic. It happened.
Oddly, it is this awful certainty which overwhelms me in the end. I cannot
endure the frenzied onslaught, and I fall back. A man drunk on an impossibly
rich and heady elixir, I slump against the wall, blind and insensate. Resting
the metal rod across my lap, I press the heels of my hands to my poor eyes.
Instantly, the images cease. Upon releasing the rod, I have broken contact
with the source of the dream, and am myself released to the blessed, soothing
darkness of the cavern.
Oh, but it is a darkness lit by the flickering light of a strange and glorious
magic. The dream is alive in me. Slowly, slowly, with ignorant, faltering
steps I begin the first feeble attempt to impose some small order on the
irreducible chaos of the thoughts and images whirling inside my mind.