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

were seals lying at the base of the sea cliff, a throng of them, half a hundred or more.
“So many,” said Korridun. “My cousins prosper.”
Of all the tribes, only his people, the Seal Kindred, claimed such kinship with a creature of
Sakeema. We of the Red Hart cherished the deer, but we knew our shortcoming, that we
could not like them leap out of bowshot with a single bound. . . . But the Seal Kindred
claimed a seal ancestor, Sedna, from whom sprang their royal line. They called seals
“cousins,” as I had many times heard my people grumbling around a campfire—my people
of the Red Hart, but I could not remember their faces. Danger, if I remembered their faces.
Korridun guided me by the arm. We were drawing near the lodges, threading our way along
steep shelving rock, and the chill air had braced me so that I walked more strongly, without
much help. But we did not enter any lodge. Instead, Birc left us and, running ahead, brought
back a torch. Rad Korridun guided me under an pverhang, and I stood in such a cave as I
had never seen.
Eerie, it seemed to me at the time, the smoothness of the rock walls, as if a sleek giant of
an otter had made the place to slide in, had made tunnels everywhere running off at all
levels, no pattern to them that I could discern. And the floor, if it might be called a floor, lay all
in swells, like the surface of a quiet sea. I had experienced the jagged mountain caves
where the mountain cats once denned, but this was of a different sort of stone, brown and
polished, and far more open, so that a man could walk upright in it. But what man could have
built it, or would have fashioned it so askew?
“The sea made this Hold, we think, ages past, and has since withdrawn,” Korridun said, as if
I had asked him. “Perhaps one day it will take a notion to surge up again. There is no
telling.”
I did not understand him, how the sea could make caves. Still less, how its level could
change. I knew but little then of the ways of that vast, cold greendeep.
We came to a room, or rather a large hollow, which glowed warm and red with fire. There
was a stone firepit built against an upward crevice, which made a smoke hole for it. Much
food stood by the fire, and there were places for many people, timber stumps topped with
thick pelts for sitting on and long, flat, timbers laid between supports for the placing of food.
But there were no folk. Birc threw his torch in the fire and left the place, nearly running, and
Korridun motioned me to a seat on one of the fur-topped stumps. But I settled myself
cross-legged on the floor instead, as is the Red Hart custom, picking with my hands at the
rushes that strewed it. Korridun dipped me food out of a basket of spruce roots, tight-woven
and sealed with pitch to make a vessel fit for cooking in. It was a thick soup made of fish,
boiled in the basket with stones heated in the fire, much as my folk would have made a
venison stew and used the stomach of the deer to hold it. Korridun brought the food to me in
a bowl of red clay, and I felt all the honor of that. Vessels of clay had to be traded from the
Herders, from the far plains beyond the thunder cones. Most Seal folk, I thought, would eat
from dishes of wood or shell. But perhaps Korridun himself was accustomed to clay. He was
the king.
He handed me the bowl and a bone spoon. “Eat slowly,” he cautioned me.
I was ravenous, as hungry as I had been after the days of my name vigil, but I was not much
accustomed to fish, and the odd, oily taste kept me from gulping it too quickly. Korridun got
some of the stuff for himself and sat on a sort
of bench, setting his bowl on a flat timber. I eyed him, holding my own bowl on my lap, and
we ate in silence. There were many questions I was not asking—how I had come into the
prison pit, and when, and why I had been bound, and why were the marks of the thongs on
my limbs, as if I had fought most fiercely, and why was he, Korridun King, attending me. For
the most part, I did not want to know the answers. But when I had taken the edge from my
hunger, silence began to press on me again, and I spoke.