"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Barrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

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Night came down along the snowy road from the mountains. Darkness ate
the village, the stone tower of Vermare Keep, the barrow by the road.
Darkness stood in the corners of the rooms of the Keep, sat under the
great table and on every rafter, waited behind the shoulders of each man at
the hearth.

The guest sat in the best place, a corner seat projecting from one
side of the twelve-foot fireplace. The host, Freyga, Lord of the Keep, Count
of the Montayna, sat with everybody else on the hearth-stones, though
nearer the fire than some. Cross-legged, his big hands on his knees, he
watched the fire steadily. He was thinking of the worst hour he had known in
his twenty-three years, a hunting trip, three autumns ago, to the mountain
lake Malafrena. He thought of how the thin barbarian arrow had stuck up
straight from his father’s throat; he remembered how the cold mud had
oozed against his knees as he knelt by his father’s body in the reeds, in the
circle of the dark mountains. His father’s hair had stirred a little in the
lake-water. And there had been a strange taste in his own mouth, the taste
of death, like licking bronze. He tasted bronze now. He listened for the
women’s voices in the room overhead.

The guest, a traveling priest, was talking about his travels. He came
from Solariy, down in the southern plains. Even merchants had stone
houses there, he said. Barons had palaces, and silver platters, and ate
roast beef. Count Freyga’s liege men and servants listened open-mouthed.
Freyga, listening to make the minutes pass, scowled. The guest had
already complained of the stables, of the cold, of mutton for breakfast
dinner and supper, of the dilapidated condition of Vermare Chapel and the
way Mass was said there—“Arianism!” he had muttered, sucking in his
breath and crossing himself. He told old Father Egius that every soul in
Vermare was damned: they had received heretical baptism. “Arianism,
Arianism!” he shouted. Father Egius, cowering, thought Arianism was a
devil and tried to explain that no one in his parish had ever been
possessed, except one of the count’s rams, who had one yellow eye and
one blue one and had butted a pregnant girl so that she miscarried her
child, but they had sprinkled holy water on the ram and it made no more
trouble, indeed was a fine breeder, and the girl, who had been pregnant out
of wedlock, had married a good peasant from Bara and borne him five little
Christians, one a year. “Heresy, adultery, ignorance!” the foreign priest had
railed. Now he prayed for twenty minutes before he ate his mutton,
slaughtered, cooked, and served by the hands of heretics. What did he
want? thought Freyga. Did he expect comfort, in winter? Did he think they
were heathens, with his “Arianism”? No doubt he had never seen a
heathen, the little, dark, terrible people of Malafrena and the farther hills. No
doubt he had never had a pagan arrow shot at him. That would teach him
the difference between heathens and Christian men, thought Freyga.

When the guest seemed to have finished boasting for the time being,