"Ursula K. LeGuin - Earthsea 5 - The Other Wind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

and men with such a blemish or difference about them become witches or sorcerers
perforce, "marked for it," people say. Blackberry learned spells and could do the most
ordinary kind of witchery; she had no real gift for it, but she had a way about her that
was almost as good as the gift itself. She made a living, and trained her son as well as
she could, and saved enough to prentice him to the sorcerer who gave him his true
name.
Of his father Alder said nothing. He knew nothing. Blackberry had never spoken of
him. Though seldom celibate, witches seldom kept company more than a night or two
with any man, and it was a rare thing for a witch to marry a man. Far more often two
of them lived their lives together, and that was called witch marriage or she-troth. A
witch's child, then, had a mother or two mothers, but no father. That went without
saying, and Sparrowhawk asked nothing on that score; but he asked about Alder's
training.
The sorcerer Gannet had taught Alder the few words he knew of the True Speech, and

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Le Guin, Ursula - [Earthsea 05] The Other Wind

some spells of finding and illusion, at which Alder had shown, he said, no talent at all.
But Gannet took enough interest in the boy to discover his true gift. Alder was a
mender. He could rejoin. He could make whole. A broken tool, a knife blade or an axle
snapped, a pottery bowl shattered: he could bring the fragments back together without
joint or seam or weakness. So his master sent him about seeking various spells of
mending, which he found mostly among witches of the island, and he worked with
them and by himself to learn to mend.
"That is a kind of healing," Sparrowhawk said. "No small gift, nor easy craft."
"It was a joy to me," Alder said, with a shadow of a smile in his face. "Working out the
spells, and finding sometimes how to use one of the True Words in the work… To put
back together a barrel that's dried, the staves all fallen in from the hoops—that's a real
pleasure, seeing it build up again, and swell out in the right curve, and stand there on
its bottom ready for the wine…There was a harper from Meoni, a great harper, oh, he
played like a storm on the high hills, like a tempest on the sea. He was hard on the harp
strings, twanging and pulling them in the passion of his art, so they'd break at the very
height and flight of the music. And so he hired me to be there near him when he
played, and when he broke a string I'd mend it quick as the note itself, and he'd play
on."
Sparrowhawk nodded with the warmth of a fellow professional talking shop. "Have
you mended glass?" he asked.
"I have, but it's a long, nasty job," Alder said, "with all the tiny little bits and speckles
glass goes to."
"But a big hole in the heel of a stocking can be worse," Sparrowhawk said, and they
discussed mending for a while longer, before Alder returned to his story.
He had become a mender, then, a sorcerer with a modest practice and a local reputation
for his gift. When he was about thirty, he went to the principal city of the island,
Meoni, with the harper, who was playing for a wedding there. A woman sought him
out in their lodging, a young woman, not trained as a witch; but she had a gift, she
said, the same as his, and wanted him to teach her. And indeed she had a greater gift
than his. Though she knew not a word of the Old Speech, she could put a smashed jug
back together or mend a frayed-out rope just with the movements of her hands and a
wordless song she sang under her breath, and she had healed broken limbs of animals