"Nancy Springer- Sea King Trilogy 01 - Madbond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

not feel tall, sitting bound and helpless as I was.
“You are no prisoner. You are my guest,” he told me. “I have but to call, and they will let the
pole down for us from above.”
He was not, then, a captive like myself? Perhaps not. He moved about freely, while I sat
bound, and there was nothing of a captive’s despair in his look.
Or did they treat prisoners so well, here? My glance dropped to my hands. The rawhide
thongs that bound the wrists were padded heavily with wrappings of fleece, as if to spare
me discomfort. I sat on a thick bed of linden-bark matting and pelts—sealskins, they were,
and they made a warmer, thicker bed than I had ever known. Someone had taken care for
me, as if indeed I were an honored guest.
I could see that my companion had slept nearby. His bedding lay beside him, but it was only
a single sealskin and a fleece for his head. Sitting half in shadow, he gazed at me steadily,
as if waiting for something. “What is your name?” I asked him, for in my own silence I was
beginning to feel the pressure of a blackness—I did not want to comprehend that blackness
more threatening than the prison pit.
“Rad.”
It was a name of the Seal Kindred and told me little. “Is there a meaning to it?” I hazarded. “If
you would care to tell me,” I added for courtesy’s sake.
He shrugged. “It is the foolish name my mother gave me,’sea otter.’ She often told me the
tale, how on my infant naming day when she carried me down to the shore to ask the sea for
a name, an untoward wave knocked her off her feet so that I was hurled into the greendeep.
She dived after me but could not find me, and she raised the lament for the dead, for she felt
sure that I had been drowned.” The youth who called himself Rad looked at me with
straight-lipped amusement. “Babes of the Seal Kindred in their first moon do not swim, no
matter what the Otter River Clan may claim. So the entire tribe lamented me loudly. But a
month later a man searching for glimmerstones after a storm found me in a sea cave, being
suckled by a seal, and he bore me home rejoicing.”
I listened, not knowing whether to believe him, or how much to believe.
“I was too scrawny to be called the little seal, my mother said. So she called me Rad. I had
the look of a sea otter, she said, slender and handsome.” I saw his straight mouth twitch, as
if he mocked himself, and I decided that the tale was not meant to be believed, though I
should have known it was too foolish not to be true. “Also, my father was of the Otter clan.
Though as for sea otters, she could not have ever seen one. Children watch the kelp beds,
but none have been seen for generations.”
At once I felt my heart yearn. Another of Sakeema’s creatures, gone, like the wolves. Like
the great red catamounts. My grandfather had seen such a mountain cat once, my
grandfather now dead, but even in his dying age manly and proud in his bearing, his long
braids, once as yellow-brown as mine, gone bone white—
“And what might your name be?” Rad asked me, and in the space of a quickly drawn breath
it was as if my grandfather had disappeared beneath—the thing I would
not remember. I could no longer see him, any more than I could truly see myself, and I stared
at the one who asked me the question.
“Your name,” he repeated, as if perhaps I hadn’t understood him. But my name lay hidden in
the—deep, deep, glinting darkly like a weapon of sharp edge.
“I do not know,” I told him.
“But you must have a name,” he pressed me gently.
“I do not remember.” I truly did not, and I was not dismayed. In fact I felt glad, as glad as a
captive of war might feel, excused from torment. My companion peered at me and nodded
as if understanding something.
“We’ll call you Archer, then,” he said, “after those calluses on your hand.”