"R. A. MacAvoy - L2 - King of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

Arlin’s beautiful, lean hero’s face looked more woffish, more dangerous. “At any time you can have it
back. All of Norwess. I will get it for you, Nazhuret.”
My wistfulness dissolved into laughter, but not because I didn’t believe she could do it. “No,” I said. “I
don’t want Norwess. You know I don’t. It just hurts.”
I don’t think we said anything more until we came to the gates of the palace.
You, Powl Inpres, Earl Daraln, must have seen Norwess many times, climbing the long slope in dry air
with your ears popping. This was only my second sight of the place (second within adult recall, of course)
and I had expected to find’ that memory had added grandeur. Memory had not.
The endless whiteness of it was the most impressive thing, for the only available stone was the native
limestone, and though the structure had grown and rambled through many builders and many
generations—turning from fortress to castle to manor to palace as civilization turned around it—it had
maintained this unity of color. Against the backdrop of bare mountains, scarcely darker than its walls, it
seemed a work of nature as much as a work of man.
It had hundreds of windows: tall ones, many-paned, slotted ones, without panes, arched ones rimmed in
colored glass, and at the western face bottom, very ordinary ones with bad glazing and iron grilles.
(These last I knew from the time I had begged breakfast in the scullery.) I could keep myself in steady
work for years, maintaining the windows of my father’s palace, if the owner would hire me.
The park of Leoue Palace is in two sections, the larger filling the valley that leads up to the gate and the
smaller, scarcely two miles on a side, enclosed by a wall some eight feet high which shone with the same
brightness as the house itself: Arlin and I approached the gate through the wood, which was largely
conifer and riddled with large, protruding stones. The air seemed empty, lacking the incense I expected
out of the evergreens, but that might have been only my unaccustomed nose.
The gate itself was of iron, higher than the level of the stones and very ornate. It was guarded by a soldier
equally ornate, in the black of Leone with Leoue’s gold braid. He leaned against the round-arched cubby
in the wall that was his only shelter, one hand on the length of a very archaic halberd.
I wondered if the man had any more reasonable weapon with which to face intruders. I did not think he
could give us much trouble, even with Arlin weakened by travail and travel. But it seemed we couldnot
win anything but ill feeling by overpowering the household defenses, so we decided to come in a good
thirty yards from the gate, climbing over the wall.
Nowhere were there trees dose enough to help in the endeavor, but I stood on Arlin’s shoulders, lay
myself along the top, and pulled her up after me.
I had not before seen this aspect of the garden. Someone, either Duke Leone or my father or their wives
perhaps, was of the school which likes to make plants look like animals. The juniper bushes that
surrounded us were carved into hedgehogs, roedeer, standing rabbits, and other brutes less recognizable,
and the winding paths were lined with pillars of ivy on wire, each of which was topped by a flock of
vegetable birds. Through this fantasy slipped a bright small stream, which looked like nothing but itself,
yet where it widened into a pond, I glimpsed a number of large goldfish with diaphanous fins, looking like
orange flowers.
Arlin took me by the elbow and pulled me into the shrubbery, for I was becoming dazed by the place. “I
prefer an honest rosebush myself,” she said, and added, “You’re sunburned. Things up here are different,
even the sun. Be careful.”
I rubbed my eyes to displace the oddities I had seen and reminded Arlin that I am always sunburned.
She got to see her rosebushes as we stole from garden to garden, and I got to see more ponds and
fishes. The maze we avoided entirely, and we came to the main door over a terrace of white limestone
and black slate, feeling dwarfed by all the magnificence and very dusty.
A footman in black and gold came out of the small, plain door hidden among the pillars. He took Arlin by
the upper arm, or thought he had done so, and asked what we meant by our presence. He was left
staring at his open hand, won-dering why it dutched nothing.
Arlin looked blandly across at the man in the way she has when deciding which part of an opponent
should be broken first. I announced myself to be Nazhuret of Sordaling, and I requested to be brought