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

of his own craft was present. He would not, Sander was sure, begrudge that his
possessions be used again, carefully, and to a purpose that might in the end
benefit all men.
Sander fitted the two hammerheads in among the tools he carried. He would hunt
no farther. Let the dead smith keep all else as grave-hold. But such hammers he
did not have and he needed them.
He wanted no more of this nameless village wherein death stank and spirits might
be tied to their destroyed homes. Rhin sensed that decision, greeting it with a
yelp of approval. However, Sander was not minded to leave the shore of the
sea--if sea this was. Rather he passed as quickly as he could among the
smoldering buildings, refusing to look at the bodies he passed, to come out upon
the slippery sand of the shore.
To prove that he might have reached one of his objectives, he advanced to where
the small waves ended in foam upon the sand. There he dipped a finger into the
water and licked the moisture. Salt! Yes, he had found the sea.
However it was not the sea alone that he sought, but rather the heart of the old
legends around it. It was along the shore of the sea that there once had stood
many great cities of old. And in those cities lay the secrets concerning which
Sander's father had often speculated.
It was certain that men before the Dark Time had possessed such knowledge that
they had lived as might spirits of the upper air, with unseen servants and all
manner of labor-saving tools. Yet that learning had been lost. Sander did not
know the number of years that lay between him and that time, but the sum was
more, his father had said, than the lifetimes of many, many men, each a
generation behind the other.
When, at the death of his father from the coughing sickness, Ibbets, his
father's younger brother, had denied Sander the smith-right, saying he was only
an untried boy and unfit to serve the Mob, then it was that Sander knew he must
prove himself, not only to the people whom he had believed kin-blood, but to
himself. He must become such a worker of metal that his own number of years or
lack of them would mean nothing, only the fact that many things could be wrought
by his design and his skill. So it was that, when Ibbets would have bound him to
a new apprenticeship, he had instead claimed go-forth rights, and the Mob had
been forced to grant him that choice of exile.
Now he was kinless by his own hard decision. And there burned fiercely in him
the need to know that he was a better smith, or would be, than Ibbets claimed.
To do that he must learn. And he was sure that such knowledge lay somewhere near
the original source of the lumps of congealed metal that the traders brought.
Some of the metal could be worked by strength of arm and hammer alone. Other
kinds must be heated, run into molds, or struck when hot to form the needed tool
or weapon. But there were some metals that defied all attempts to work them. And
it was the secret of those that, from childhood, had fascinated Sander.
He had found the sea; now he could go north or south along its shore. There had
been great changes in the land, he knew. Perhaps such cities as he sought were
long since buried under the wash of the waves, or else so overturned by
earth-shaking that little remained. Yet somewhere the Traders found their metal,
so somewhere such sources existed--and those he could seek.
It was close to nightfall, and he did not wish to camp close to the
half-destroyed town. He pushed on northward. Above, sea birds wheeled and
screamed hoarsely, and the steady roll of the waves made a low accompaniment to