"George R. R. Martin & Tuttle, Lisa - Windhaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

When the vague predawn light first began to swallow up the stars, she had nothing in her pockets but two
pieces of milky sea-glass and a clam. It was a big heavy clam, large as her hand, with the rough pebbly
shell that meant it was the best kind for eating, the kind whose meat was black and buttery. But she had
only been able to find one. Everything else that had washed up was worthless driftwood.
The child was about to turn back, as her mother had told her to, when she saw the flash of metal in the
sky— a sudden silver gleam, as if a new star had come to life, outshining all the others.

It was north of her, out above the sea. She watched where it had been, and a moment later it flashed
again, a little to the left. She knew what it was: a flyer's wings had caught the first rays of the rising sun,
before they quite touched the rest of the world.

The child wanted to follow, to run and see. She loved to watch the flight of birds, the little rainbirds and
the fierce nighthawks and the scavenger kites; and the flyers with their great silver wings were better than
any birds. But it was almost dawn, and her mother had told her to turn back at dawn.

She ran. If she hurried, she thought, if she ran all the way there and all the way back, she might have time
to watch for a while, before her mother could miss her. So she ran and ran, past the lazy late-risers who
were just coming out to wander on the beach. The clam bounced in her pocket.

The eastern sky was all pale orange by the time she reached the flyers' place, a wide expanse of sandy
beach where they often landed, beneath the high cliff from which they launched. The child liked to climb
the cliff and watch from up there, with the wind in her hair and her little legs dangling over the edge and
the sky all around her. But today there was no time. She had to go back soon, or her mother would be
angry.

She had come too late, anyway. The flyer was landing.

He made a last graceful pass over the sand, his wings sweeping by thirty feet above her head. She stood
and watched with wide eyes. Then, out above the water, he tilted himself; one silver wing went down and
one went up, and all at once he came around in a wide circle. And then he straightened and came on
ahead, descending gracefully, so he barely touched the sand as he came skimming in.

There were other people on the beach—a young man and an older woman. They ran alongside the flyer
as he came in, and helped to stop him, and afterward they did something to his wings that made them
collapse. The two of them folded up the wings, slowly and with care, while the flyer undid the straps that
bound them to his body.

Watching, the girl saw that he was the one she liked. There were lots of flyers, she knew, and she had
seen many of them and even learned to recognize some, but there were only three that came often, the
three who lived on her own island. The child imagined that they must live high on the cliffs, in houses that
looked something like the nests of birds, but with walls of priceless silver metal. One of the three was a
stern, gray-haired woman with a sour face. The second was only a boy, dark-haired and achingly
handsome, with a pleasant voice; she liked him better. But her favorite was the man on the beach, a man
as tall and lean and wide of shoulder as her father had been, clean-shaven, with brown eyes and curling
red-brown hair. He smiled a lot, and seemed to fly more than any of them.

"You," he said.

The child looked up, terrified, and found him smiling at her.