"MacLeod, Ian R - Sealight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

not to leak for a change.

Ribald shouts rang across the little flotilla. Ran's fellow fishermen knew that
he was getting married tomorrow, and were full of advice as to his wedding
night. Ran made the appropriate gestures to them, knowing that they would be
unable to tell whether he was actually smiling.

The wind hurried them down through the main channel toward the lagoon. The
seagulls circled and cried. Spires and cupolas flashed bronze and drifted to
leeward.

Off to the east, the last island of the city soared darkly from weedblack rocks.
As he had done each morning since his childhood, Ran gazed toward it. This was
where the palace of Torea raised the dark shoulders of its impenetrable seaward
face, shrugging off storm and time. He had learned of its legend, which is also
the legend of Lady Jolenta, from his long-dead father as he sat at the prow of
this same little boat. How Jolenta had been cursed with ageless beauty five
centuries before, and how it was said that she still lived somewhere beyond
those ragged battlements. Every few decades, some nobleman would tire of writing
turgid poetry in her honor and vow to release her, make her his lover, even his
wife. But the stories always ended there. The abandoned Eastern Quarter of the
city was a dangerous place at the best of times, where ghosts darted in the dark
canals and the mined houses held secrets best left undiscovered, those who tried
to penetrate the walls of Torea were invariably never heard of again.

What Lady Jolenta needed, Ran had decided long ago, was an adventurer, a hero
from the dazzling pages of the books Ran lacked the talent to read. Some giant
built with shoulders like a milk yoke, golden hair and flashing blue eyes, a
magic sword and a dark secret. Ran gazed up at Torea's massive central tower,
topped by a widening profusion of roofs, weathervanes and turrets like a warted
mushroom. Sometimes, when he returned weary from a day hauling the nets and
stared up at it through the grainy evening, he thought he glimpsed a light
flickering from the highest window. But tomorrow he was to be married, and the
sun was already bright enough to douse a thousand lanterns. It seemed that there
was no room left in his life for such mysteries.

Ran hawked up a gob of spit, lobbed it an admirable distance. He swung the boom
toward the wind and cut through the water, leaving the little flotilla behind.
Partly, he wanted to spend his last day of bachelorhood alone, but also the
further west he sailed along the coast, the bigger his catch of skidling was
likely to be. Mostly, the fishermen in their fragile boats preferred to keep
together and net the thinner shoals in the middle flats of the lagoon rather
than risk going near the marches. Even the surrounding waters were places of
uncertain danger, tied to the past by a gray pall of nightmare legends. But
Ran's boat was close to the end of its life. His grandfather had bought it
thirdhand many years ago. Now, the boards were split and the sail was more patch
than canvas. Within the next year or two, and if a storm didn't catch him
before, Ran would need a new boat. With his mother to support -- and now Piir
and the child that was forming in her belly-- it was imperative that he find the
money.