"Damar - 03 - The Hero And The Crown" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

"You must have eaten half the tree, from the size of the scar of the branch you took off. Enough for two or three Merths. Are you really trying to kill yourself?" Here his voice almost broke, and he had to get up and stamp around the room, and kick over a handy chair, which he then picked up agaimto that
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Teka wouldn't notice and ban him from the sickroom. He sat on the edge of Aerin's bed and brooded. "It must have been Galanna. It always is Galanna. What did she do this time?"
Aerin stirred. "Of course it's Galanna. I've been desperate to think of an excuse to get out of attending her wedding. It's only a little over a season away, you know. This was the best that occurred to me."
Tor laughed—grudgingly, but it was a laugh. "Almost I forgive you." He reached out and grabbed one of her hands. She refrained from telling him that his bouncing on the edge of her bed was making her feel sick, and that every time he moved she had to refocus her eyes on him and that made her feel more sick, and she squeezed his hand. "I guess she dared you to eat a leaf. I guess she told you you weren't royal and wouldn't dare touch it." He looked at her sternly. She looked back, her face blank. He knew her too well, and he knew she knew, but she wouldn't say anything; he knew that too, and he sighed.
Her father visited her occasionally, but he always sent warning ahead, and as soon as she could creak out of bed without immediately falling down in a heap, she began receiving him in her sitting-room, bolt upright in a straight chair and hands crossed in her lap. To his queries she answered that she was feeling quite well now, thank you. She had learned that no one could tell how badly her vision wandered in and out of focus, so long as she kept still where the dizziness couldn't distract her; and she kept her eyes fixed on the shifting flesh-colored shadows where she knew her father's face was. He never stayed long, and since she closed her eyes when he came near to stoop over her and kiss her cheek or forehead (other people's movements were almost as dizzying as her own) she never saw the anxious look on his face, and he didn't shout at her, like Teka or Tor.
When she was enough better to totter out of bed for a longer stretch than into a chair in her sitting-room, or rather when she hated her bed so thoroughly that Teka could no longer keep her in it, she had to make her way around the castle by feeling along the walls, for neither her eyes nor her feet were trustworthy. Creeping about like one of her father's retired veterans escaped from the grace-and-favor apartments in the rear of the castle did nothing for her morale, and she avoided everyone but Teka, and to some extent Tor, even more single-
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mindedly than usual; and she stayed out of the court's way altogether.
Especially she avoided the garden at the center of the castle. The surka stood by the main gate, wrapped around one of the tall white pillars. Its presence was symbolic only; anyone might pass the gate without danger of touching its leaves, and there were several other ways into the garden. But she felt that the surka exhaled hallucinations into the very air around it, waiting gleefully for her to breathe them in, and that it clattered its leaves at her if she came too near. She heard it mocking her if she even dared step out on one of the balconies that overlooked the garden from three or four stories up. Her protracted illness more nearly proved Galanna's contention about her heritage than her own, whatever Tor said, but she saw no reason to remind herself of it any oftener than she had to.
It was a kind of trapped restlessness combined with a feeling of kinship for the equally trapped and restless Talat that drew her to his pasture. She had visited him before, or tried to, in the last three years, but he was no politer to her than he was to Hornmar, and it hurt her so much just to look at him that out of cowardice she had stopped going. Now she felt she no longer cared; she couldn't see clearly two feet beyond the end of her nose anyway. But it was a somewhat laborious process to carry out even so simple a plan as to walk to one of the smaller pastures beyond the royal barns. First she wanted a cane, that she might have something to tap her way with; so she persuaded Tor to open the door of the king's treasure house for her, which required a lock-relaxing charm she couldn't perform any more than she could mend plates.
She told Tor only that she wanted to borrow a walking stick to help her up and down stairs. Tor knew perfectly well that she had something further on her mind, but he did it anyway. She chose a cane with a pleasantly lumpy head, since her sense of touch was sometimes a little vague too.
Talat's first impulse had been to charge her. She'd not moved, just looked at him, leaning on her cane and swaying gently. "If I try to run away from you, the earth will leap up and throw me down." Two tears rolled silently down her cheeks. "I can't even walk properly. Like you." Talat dropped his head and began grazing—without much interest, but it gave him something to pretend to be doing while he kept an eye on her. *
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She went back the next day, and the next. The exercise, or the fresh air, or both, seemed to do her some good; her vision began to clear a bit. And it was quiet and peaceful in Talat's pasture, where no one came, and she went back to the swarming castle more and more reluctantly. Then the thought of the royal library occurred to her. Galanna would never set foot in the library.
She went there the first time only to escape her own rooms, which had begun to seem the size of shoeboxes, and for some of the same imprecise restlessness that had inspired her to visit Talat. But, idly, she ran her fingers over the spines of the books fined up on the shelves, and pulled down one that had anjnterestingly tooled binding. More idly still she opened it, and found that her poor muddled eyes focused quite nicely on a printed page held not too far from her nose—found that she could read. The next day she took it with her to Talat's pasture.
He didn't exactly meet her with an eager whinny of greeting, but he did seem to spend most of his time on the unmuddy shore of the pool, where she leaned against the bole of a convenient tree and read. "It's funny," she said, chewing a grass gem, "you'd think if I couldn't walk I couldn't read either. You'd think eyes would be at least as hard to organize as feet." She leaned over, and laid a mik-bar down on the ground as far away from her as she could reach, and sat up again, looking \ only straight before her. Thoughtfully she hefted the big book in her lap and added, "Even carrying it around is useful. It sort of weighs me down, and I don't stagger so much." She could hear his hoofbeats: thunk-thunk-thunk-drag. "Maybe what I need for my feet is the equivalent of the muscular concentration of reading." The hoofbeats paused. "Now if only someone could tell me what that might be."
The mik-bar had disappeared.
CHAPTER 4
TEKA FOUND HER OUT very soon; she'd been keeping a very sharp eye on her wayward sol since she first crawled out of bed after the surka episode. She'd been appalled when she first discovered Aerin under the tree in the vicious stallion's paddock; but she had a bit more sense than Aerin gave her credit for ("Fuss, fuss, fuss, Teka! Leave me alonel") and with her heart beating in her mouth she realized that Talat knew that his domain had been invaded and didn't mind. She saw him eat his first mik-bar, and when they thereafter began disappearing at an unseemingly rate from the bowl on Aerin's win-dowseat, Teka only sighed deeply and began providing them in greater quantity.
The book with the interesting binding was a history of Damar. Aerin had had to learn a certain amount of history as part of her royal education, but this stuff was something else again. The lessons she'd been forced to learn were dry spare things, the facts without the sense of them, given in the simplest of language, as if words might disguise the truth or (worse) bring it to life. Education was one of Arlbeth's pet obsessions; before him there hadn't been a king in generations who felt much desire for book learning, and there was no precedent for quality in royal tutors.
The book was faded with age, and the style of lettering was strange to her, so she had to puzzle out some of the wtords; and
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some of the words were archaic and unfamiliar, so she had to puzzle out the meanings. But it was worth it, for this book told her stories more exciting than the ones she made up for herself before she fell asleep at night. And so, as she read, she first learned of the old dragons.
Damar had dragons still; little ones, dog-sized, nasty, mean-tempered creatures who would fry a baby for supper and swallow it in two gulps if they could; but they had been beaten back into the heavy forest and the wilder Hills by Aerin's day. They still killed an occasional unwary hunter, for they had no fear, and they had teeth and claws as well as fire to subdue their prey, but they were no longer a serious threat. Arlbeth heard occasionally of one—or of a family, for they most often hunted in families—that was harassing a village or an outlying farm, and when that happened a party of men with spears and arrows—swords were of little use, for if one were close enough to use a sword, one was close enough to be badly burned— went out from the City to deal with them. Always they came back with a few more unpleasant stories of the cunning treachery of dragons; always they came back nursing a few scorched limbs; occasionally they came back a horse or a hound the less.
But there was no glamour in dragon-hunting. It was hard, tricky, grim work, and dragons were vermin. The folk of the hunt, the thotar, who ran the king's dogs and provided meat for the royal household, would have nothing to do with dragons, and dogs once used for dragons were considered worthless for anything else.
There were still the old myths of the great dragons, huge scaled beasts many times larger than horses; and it was sometimes even said that the great dragons flew, flew in the air, with wingspreads so vast as to blacken the sun. The little dragons had vestigial wings, but no one had ever seen or heard of a dragon that could lift its thick squat body.off the ground with them. They beat their wings in anger and in courtship, as they raised their crests; but that was all. The old dragons were no more nor less of a tale than that of flying dragons.
But this book took the old dragons seriously. It said that while the only dragons humankind had seen in many years were little ones, there were still one or two of the great ones hiding in the Hills; and that one day the one or two would fly out of their secret places and wreak havoc on man, for man
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would have forgotten how to deal with them. The great dragons lived long; they could afford to wait for that forget-fulness. From the author's defensive tone, the great dragons even in his day were a legend, a tale to tell on festival days, well lubricated with mead and wine. But she was fascinated, as he had been.
"It is with the utmost care I have gathered my information; and I think I may say with truth that the ancient Great Ones and our day's small, scurrilous beasts are the same in type. Thus anyone wishing to learn the skill to defeat a Great One can do no better than to harry as many small ones as he may find from their noisome dens, and see how they do give battle."
He went on to describe his information-gathering techniques, which seemed to consist of tirelessly footnoting the old stories for dragonish means and methods; although, thought Aerin, that could as well be from the oral tale-tellers adapting the ancient dragons to the ways of the present ones as from the truth of the author's theory. But she read on.
Dragons had short stubby legs on broad bodies; they were not swift runners over distance, but they were exceedingly nimble, and could balance easily on any one foot the better to rip with any of the other three, as well as with the barbed tail. The neck was long and whippy, so that the dragon might spray its fire at any point of the circle; and they often scraped their wings against the ground to throw up dust and further confound their enemies, or their prey.
"It is customary today to hunt the dragon with arrow and thrown spear; but if one of the Great Ones comes again, this will avail his attacker little. As their size has diminished, so has their armament; a well-thrown spear may pierce a smalt dragon anywhere it strikes. The Great Ones had only two vulnerable spots that might be depended upon: at the base of the jaw, where the narrow head joins the long neck; and behind the elbow, from whence the wings spring. Dragons are, as I have said, nimble; it is most unlikely that a Great One would be so foolish as to lower its head or its wings to make an easy mark. A great hero only may slay a Great One; one who by skill and courage may draw close enough to force the fatal blow.
"It is fortunate for all who walk the earth that the Great Ones bred but rarely; and that mankind has borne Plough
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heroes to vanquish the most of them. But it is this writer's most fervid belief that at least one more hero must stand forth from his people to face the last of the Great Ones.
"Of this last—I have said one or two; perhaps there are three or four; I know not. But of one I will make specific remark: Gorthold, who slew Crendenor and Razimtheth, went also against Maur, the Black Dragon, and it he did not slay. Gorthold, who was himself wounded unto death, said with his last strength that the dragon would die of its wounds as he would die of his; but this was never known for a certainty. The only certainty is that Maur disappeared; and has been seen by no man—or none that has brought back the tale to tell—from that day to this."
In the back of the book Aerin found an even older manuscript: just a few pages, nearly illegible with age, sewn painstakingly into the binding. Those final ancient pages were a recipe, for an ointment called kenet. An ointment that was proof against dragonfire—it said.
It had a number of very peculiar ingredients; herbs, she thought, by the sound of them. She knew just enough of the Old Tongue to recognize a few syllables; there was one that translated as "red-root." She frowned; there was a thing called redroot that showed up in boring pastoral poems, but she'd always thought it belonged to that classic category known as imaginary, like nymphs and elephants. Teka might know about redroot; she brewed a uniquely ghastly tea or tisane for every ailment, and when Aerin asked what was in the awful stuff, Teka invariably rattled off a list of things that Aerin had never heard of. She had been inclined to assume that Teka was simply putting her off with nonsense, but maybe not.
An ointment against dragonfire. If it worked—one person, alone, could tackle a dragon safely; not a Great One, of course, but the Black Dragon probably did die of its wounds ... but the little ones that were such a nuisance. At present the system was that you attacked with arrows and things from a distance, with enough of you to make a ring around it, or them, so if they bolted at someone he could run like mad while the other side of the ring was filling them full of arrows. They couldn't run far, and usually a family all bolted in the same direction. It was when they didn't that horses died.
Aerin had been sitting under the convenient tree by Talat's
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