"R. A. MacAvoy - L1 - Lens of the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

My king,
I have ruined three clean sheets and broken a pen nib in writing this salutation of two words. I had
not thought I was nervous, but how can I deny this image the world throws back at me: four smears of
black ink and one broken bit of brass?
I have been used to writing histories at your command, sir, such as that of my first visit to the court of
the Sanaur Mynauzet of Rezhmia, where the king is a demigod and the court spends half its time trying to
kill him. This narrative, set in its climate of rolling grass, high mountains, dusty spices, murder, and roses,
seemed to have an intrinsic interest beyond my ability to spoil in prose, but I am not so certain that the
story of my own forty years of life will stand so well.
If the subject of an autobiography is insipid, the narrator can only be the same, and where does that
leave me? I imagine you yawning behind the reading lens I ground for you fifteen years ago. Still I scratch
by your own order, so yawn away, King of Velonya; though you are a courteous monarch, the .paper
takes no•affronti and my .refuge is in true obedience. In this thing at least, complete obedience.
• ••
Seeking a beginning that might attach interest, I consider the incident of the wolf that might have
turned into a man, or the man with the nature of a wolf, since that episode was astonishing and full of
proper theater, but though it was bloody it was also ambiguous, and it occurred after my childhood and
schooling were over.
My initiation into the ranks of the peculiar and rightfully unpopular Naiish nomads is more instructive
in the usual sense of the term, and it has its share of blood, battle, and unex-pected changes of allegiance,
but it also happened much too recently.
I must first retreat to a time where I may describe the disinterested craftsman Powl and what he
made of an odd-shaped piece of material. This,, too, is ambiguous; I begin to see that the theme of this
whole story is ambiguity, but I must start somehow.
I will try to describe myself.
My first memory is dimness and movement: the heavy boots of soldiers and the great, white, flailing
limbs of a cook in my uncle’s kitchen. They grunted and heaved and she cried out, not in terror but in
weary disgust as they flopped her onto the rough wooden chopping table.
This interpretation is the redraft of the incident, through the mind of Nazhuret, forty years old. At the
time, the col-lected sounds had no more meaning to me than the cries of animals outside the door at
night.
Those cries can terrify children, too.
When some waggish man-at-arms lifted me off my feet and made to drop me on her belly, on the
piled wet and dirty skirts, I almost peed onto the poor woman, and my screams were much more the
usual sounds of outraged innocence than her own.
Of that house I remember no more than this. Of my uncle—I was told I had an uncle—nothing.
•.
My first real memory of myself was that of my own re-markable ugliness, revealed in the great, badly
silvered prac-tice mirror at school.
It surprises me always, how early children learn what they look like. Had I not had the name Zhurrie
the Goblin thrown into my ears every day I think I would still have known I looked like one. You, sir,
have been kind enough to deny that there is anything daunting in my features, but then you are a very
liberal man in matters of taste, and I have known you to show enthusiasm over the lines of a camel. And
then, remember that I have grown into my face, as all men do, until now it is more my years than my birth
I expose to the world.
In the mirrored wall I saw a white oval wider than long, widest just below the great, staring, lashless
eyes. My nose, which would someday arc out and then tilt up (like water flown on a windy lake), hardly
existed in those years, and my mouth was very small. My ears attempted to make up for the inadequacies
of my lower features, however. They stood out so wide that I looked as though I had my hands cupped