"Ursula K. Leguin - The Flyers Of Gy - An Interplanetary Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

high above the sea and push the victim over, shouting, "Fly! Fly for us!"

Among the steppe tribes, the wings are allowed to develop completely, and the
youth is carefully, worshipfully attended all that year. Let us say that it is
a girl who has shown the fatal symptoms. In her feverish trances she functions
as a shaman and soothsayer. The priests listen and interpret all her sayings
to the people. When her wings are full grown, they are bound down to her back.
Then the whole tribe set out to walk with her to the nearest high place,
cliff, or crag—often a journey of weeks, in that flat, desolate country.

On the heights, after days of dancing and imbibing hallucinatory smoke from
smudge-fires of byubyu wood, the priests go with the young woman, all of them
drugged, dancing and singing, to the edge of the cliff. There her wings are
freed. She lifts them for the first time, and then like a falcon leaving the
nest, leaps stumbling off the cliff into the air, wildly beating those huge,
untried wings. Whether she flies or falls, all the men of the tribe, screaming
with excitement, shoot at her with bow and arrow or throw their razor-pointed
hunting spears. She falls, pierced by dozens of spears and arrows. The women
scramble down the cliff, and if there is any life left in her they beat it out
with stones. They then throw and heap stones over the body till it is buried
under a cairn.

There are many cairns at the foot of every steep hill or crag in all the
steppe country; the ancient cairns furnish stones for the new ones.

Such young people may try to escape their fate by running away from their
people, but the weakness and fever that attend the development of wings
cripple them, and they never get far.

There is a folktale in the South Marches of Merm of a winged man who leapt up
into the air from the sacrificial crag and flew so strongly that he escaped
the spears and arrows and disappeared into the sky. The original story ends
there. The playwright Norwer used it as the base for a romantic tragedy. In
his play Transgression, the young man has appointed a tryst with his beloved,
and flies there to meet with her; but she has unwittingly betrayed him to
another suitor, who lies in wait. As the lovers embrace, the suitor hurls his
spear and kills the winged one. The maiden pulls out her own knife and kills
the murderer and then—after exchanging anguished farewells with the not quite
expired winged one—stabs herself. It is melodramatic, but if well staged, very
moving; everybody has tears in their eyes when the hero first descends like an
eagle, and when, dying, he enfolds his beloved in his great bronze wings.

A version of Transgression was performed a few years ago on my plane, in
Chicago, at the Actual Reality Theater. It was probably inevitably, but
unfortunately, translated as Sacrifice of the Angels. There is absolutely no
mythology or lore concerning anything like our angels among the Gyr.
Sentimental pictures of sweet little cherubs with baby wings, hovering
guardian spirits, or grander images of divine messengers would strike them as
a hideous mockery of something every parent and every adolescent dreads: a
rare but fearful deformity, a curse, a death sentence.