"Michael Moorcock - The Dreamthief's Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

conquer entropy is to reach a compromise with death, always the ultimate victor in our conflicts.
There's something to be said for dedicating one's life to an impossible cause. Perhaps an easier
decision for a solitary albino aristocrat full of the idealism of previous centuries, disliked by his
contemporaries and a discomfort to his tenants. One given to reading and brooding. But not unaware,
never unaware, that outside the old, thick walls of Bek, in my rich and complex Germany, the world was
beginning to march to simplistic tunes, numbing the race mind so that it would deceive itself into making
war again. Into destroying itself again.
Instinctively, still a teenager, and after an inspiring school trip to the Nile Valley and other great sites of
our civilization, I plunged deeply into archaic studies.
Old Bek grew all around me. A towered manor house to which rooms and buildings had been added
over the centuries, she emerged like a tree from the lush grounds and thickly wooded hills of Bek,
surrounded by the cedars, poplars and cypresses my crusader forebears had brought from the Holy
Land, by the Saxon oaks into which my earlier ancestors had bound their souls, so that they and the
world were rooted in the same earth. Those ancestors had first fought against Charlemagne and then
fought with him. They had sent two sons to Roncesvalles. They had been Irish pirates. They had served
King Ethelred of England.
My tutor was old von Asch, black, shrunken and gnarled, whom my brothers called The Walnut,
whose family had been
smiths and swordsmen since the time their first ancestor struck the bronze weapon. He loved me. I
was a vessel for his experience. I was willing to learn anything, try any trick to improve my skills.
Whatever he demanded, I would eventually rise to meet that expectation. I was, he said, the living record
of his family wisdom.
But von Asch's wisdom was nothing sensational. Indeed, his advice was subtle and appealed, as
perhaps he knew, to my aes-theticism, my love of the complex and the symbolic. Rather than impose his
ideas on me, he planted them like seeds. They would grow if the conditions were right. This was the
secret of his teaching. He somehow made you realize that you were doing it yourself, that the situation
demanded certain responses and what he helped you to do was trust your intuition and use it.
Of course, there was his notion of the sword's song.
"You have to listen for the song," he said. "Every great individual sword has her own song. Once you
find that song and hear it clearly, then you can fight with it, for the song is the very essence of the sword.
The sword was not forged to decorate walls or be a lifted signal of victory and dominance, but to cut
flesh, bone and sinew, and kill. She is not an extension of your manhood, nor an expression of your
selfhood. She is an instrument of death. At her best, she kills in justice. If this notion is objectionable to
you, my son—and I do not suggest for an instant that you apply it, simply that you acknowledge its
truth—then you should put away the sword forever. Fighting with swords is a refined art, but it is an art
best enjoyed when also a matter of life and death."
To fight for the ultimate—against oblivion—seemed to me exactly the noble destiny the Raven Sword,
our ancestral blade, deserved. Few down the centuries had shown much interest in this queerly wrought
old longsword inscribed with mysterious runic verses. It was even considered something of an
embarrassment. We had a few mad ancestors who had perhaps not been exemplary in their tormented
curiosity and had put the sword to strange uses. There was a report in the Mirenburg press only in the
last century. Some madman posing as a legendary creature called "Crimson Eyes" had run amok with a
blade, killing at least
thirty people before disappearing. For a while the von Beks had been suspected. The story of our
albinism was well known there. But no person was ever brought to justice. He featured dramatically in
the street literature of the day, like Jack the Ripper, Fantomas and Springheeled Jack.
Part of our vulgar and bloody past. We tended to want to forget the sword and its legends. But there
were few in the empty, abandoned and lost rooms at Bek, which had no family to fill them any longer,
who could remember. Only a few retainers too old for war or the city. And, of course, books.
When it was time for me to handle that sword whenever I wished, von Asch taught me her main