"Norton, Andre - No night without stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Andre Norton)

of healing, and thus she taught those of her blood-line. But also we have other
powers." She bit into the round of hot bread, every movement bringing sparkling
response from her ornaments. "Tell me," she said after she had chewed and
swallowed. "Why did you take out-rights, cutting yourself away from those of
your blood-kin, to hunt what you may never find? Is it because you lost face
when your people would not name you smith?"
Somehow she was able to compel the truth from him.
"I was tested and ready--my father would have said so were that not the way it
was. But Ibbets was his brother and long had wanted to be smith. He is good
enough." Though Sander grudged saying that, he must admit it. "Yet he never
seeks beyond what has been done the same way before. I would learn more--why
there are some metals that we cannot handle though the Before Men did, what were
the secrets that they held that we have lost. My father knew that this lay in my
mind, but he said always that a smith has a duty to his Mob. He must not go off
a-roving, hunting that which may not even exist. When my father died, Ibbets
made the council listen--saying that I was one with a head full of dreams, that I
was too young and heedless to be a full smith. He"--Sander's lips tightened--"he
generously offered to take me as apprentice. Apprentice! I who had been taught
by a far greater worker of metal than he dreamed to be! He was jealous of my
father, but in me he saw a way to make sure that the smith magic passed to him.
Thus I took out-rights. Let me but learn even one of the Before secrets, and I
can make Ibbets seem the apprentice!"
"And that is what you wish the most--to humble before your Mob the man who
humbled you?" she asked, brushing her fingers together to rid herself of the
crumbs of the bread.
"Not wholly that--I want also the smith secrets." The old longing came to life in
him. "I want to know how they worked that they could do so much more than we.
Were they truly so much greater in mind than we that such learning was easy for
them, that where we must seek so hard and long, they knew in an instant of
thought which is the wrong way, which is the right? Some of the ignorant--my
father claimed them so--speak now of men who learned so much that the Great Power
thought to wipe them from the earth, that they were evil in many ways and so
must be melted down as one melts a collection of metal fragments to cast anew.
Perhaps this may be so. But I seek to know what I can learn--"
"And your Rememberers were of no aid?"
Sander shook his head. "We were not a people who lived in the great cities.
Rather we were scattered in a country that was left much to itself. Always we
have been herdsmen, traveling with our animals. Our Rememberers recall the
churning of the country and that a handful of our people and a few of our
animals fled and survived. But of knowledge beyond that I have only my own
clan-line teaching, for we are of a family of smiths, not one with the Mob from
its beginning. My first Man came out of the wilderness to join with those
wanderers when they had already been roving near the time of a man's life,
fleeing ever from the breaking up of all they knew. What we have kept is not
clan knowledge, but the skill to use our hands."
She sat with her legs curled under her, her fingers playing with the small bags
that hung from her girdle. Now she nodded. "Knowledge that was needful to keep
life within the body, men held to that. But what lay beyond was often forgotten.
I wish, however, that I might talk with your Rememberers. There could be more
learned from even unknown words that might have meaning. There are such words in