"Springer, Nancy - Book Of The Isle 05 - Golden Swan v1 0.rtf" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

"Yes. Well, you would be…" I lost my voice and my nerve. Already I was sorry we had gotten into this. "A crippled bird," he said.
"Yes.". I plunged on. "Well, when Dair became a horse, that was not a falsehood or a deception. It was Dair, the horse form of Dair. It was male, as he is. It was young, as he is. I would make an old gray mare."
"But how did he do it?" Frain pursued* It was very difficult to explain anything to him. He thought in such stark terms, and I in far softer ones. There is a way of seeing a faint star by looking just to the side of it—but he had a mind like a sword, always darting swiftly to the point. I sighed.
"To be a creature—let us say a horse—" Oh, and in this plodding language of his, too. It was awful, it made everything sound like blacksmithing.
"Well, to be a horse you must feel true desire to be a horse, and you must be in sympathy with the horse—a sort of liking, but more than liking—and then you must be able to let go of your human form."
"But—you mean completely become the other thing, body, self, everything?" I think he had envisioned the process as something akin to climbing into a dead skin. I nodded. "*
"Your human form is your own. In the same way, any other form you take will be your own. When you change forms, your essence goes with you, just as when you die it flies and becomes spirit."
"But—" He floundered. "But it is monstrous!" he burst out. "Changing shapes, I mean. It is—it is unnatural!"
How bound within walls he was, walls of his own making. "It is completely natural," I said. "The goddess is a shape changer. Aene can come to us in any form."
"But the goddess—"
He stopped, thinking. When he spoke again it was coolly and very carefully.
"Shamarra is a goddess," he said, "and she has been changed to a night bird by Adalis. If she were to learn this shape changing, might she be able to revert to her human form? But I suppose you are going to tell me that it is a skill that can be neither learned nor taught."
"Maybe so, Frain," I told him. "Maybe so."
I was oddly fond of him. Not in any lustful way, either, and that was unusual for me. But he was virgin, I could sense it, and I had known from the first that he was not for me; he was not strong enough. So I had taken to mothering him, I who had given up the only child of my own. And I hated to discourage any of his dreams, however absurd.
"It may be," I added, "that at the Source many things are possible."
"Maeve," he said wearily, "I was seven years in search of one legendary land and never found it, not really, and now am I to be seven years in search of another one? How can you be so sure about this Source of yours? I am a fool for letting you lead me off like this."
It was the first time he had admitted his doubt to me. I was honored that he trusted me enough to speak so honestly.
"What can you do but follow me?" I asked.
"Nothing." He smiled ruefully. "I need you and Dair to help me help Shamarra. I can see that now."
"Tell me more about this Shamarra," I said.
So he rehearsed the tale for me again. He told it more easily every time, and more dispassionately, in a ritual way, as priests sometimes recount sacred history, as if it were a legendary account and not at all a story of living, suffering flesh, least of all his own. Shamarra had been beautiful, passionate, and she had been violated, sorely wronged by the same person who had wronged Frain, his brother whom he loved, and he seemed to assume that love of Tirell constrained Shamarra as it did him, trapped her in a river of tears perhaps, ensnared her in a net of opposed emotions as it did him, but I knew better. He was more victim than she, I suspected. Once a healer, with no longer any health to spare, tangled in a puppyish attachment, unable to see clearly or hear the word of the goddess, bound in an eternal life of callow youthfulness, crippled by anger he could not vent or resolve—he thought of himself as Shamarra's rescuer, but I felt sure he would be able to help no one until he had helped himself. And his calm words, dropped like so many lifeless stones—
Only when he spoke of Fabron, his father, did he reveal some emotion.
"He healed the beast—well, he healed Tirell, in effect, and then the power left him and he was unable to heal me. He told me I was his son—and by the time he told me I had to leave him. I think it broke his heart." Frain's face quivered a little and he turned away from the firelight. Dair whined in sympathy and I looked on, I am afraid, with the keenest interest. Here I saw guilt as well as anger.
"You had to leave?" I prodded.
"Shamarra had left."
"But why could you not stay with Fabron?"
I knew why well enough, but I wanted him to know. He winced away from the question.
"I had to follow Shamarra."
It worked both for him and against him, that steadfastness of his—stubbornness, if you will. "Frain," I said with some degree of exasperation, "Shamarra is the least of it."
"She may be to you," he retorted, "but not to me."
"Listen." I edged closer to him, closer to the fire, trying to make him hear me by virtue of sheer proximity; how had he gotten me so intent on teaching him? "Listen, Frain.
It is real and true, all you say of Shamarra, but she is like one petal on a flower, one face to a standing stone, there is more to what has happened than her."
"Such as?"
"Such as spleen! Can you not see you were furious at Tirell for what he did? And at Fabron for leading you such a dance?"
"Perhaps." lie shrugged it off. He could not deny his anger, but he would not feel it, either. "For whatever -reason," he went on dryly, "I went back to Acheron. Back to the lake where it had all begun."
"And you saw the face in the water," I said.
"Yes." He shuddered violently. "Let us not speak of that, Maeve, or I'll have no sleep tonight."
Confound him, it was the thing above all others that needed to be spoken of! But I could not do it for him. I smothered a sigh of vexation and went on.
"And Shamarra had been turned into a night bird."
"Yes."
"What, exactly," I asked, "is a night bird?"
"A little, drab bird, creature of Vieyra, the hag, the death goddess. Many of them live in the Lore Tutosel, the mountains of the. night bird to the south of Vale." The words triggered a memory; I saw the haze of it in his eyes. "Wait," he said. "Listen." He leaned back and recited a sort of song. ,
"The night bird sings Of asphodel; The day bird wakes And flaps his wings And cannot fly And lifts the cry O Tutosel, Ai Tutosel!
The night bird sings
Of Vieyra's spell,
Of Aftalun's
Sweet hydromel
And dark chimes of
The wild bluebell
In reaches of high Tutosel."