"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dragon Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

Arlian looked up at her—though not far up, as he
was almost as tall as she, now. He always liked
winter, and had never entirely understood why the
adults didn’t. In winter the mountain was covered
in snow—well, except right up by the crater—and he
and the other children of the village could go sliding
down it; there was plenty of cold, clean water
available for the melting, without having to haul it
up from the valley when the streams ran dry. He
could play outside for hours, then come in and
warm up by the fire, and no one would order him
out of the way or ask him to help with the chores.
Even the adults had less work to do in the
winter—so why did they all hate it? Yes, there was
less food and it wasn’t fresh, and the cold seeped
through everywhere, and the fire had to be kept up,
but still, Arlian thought that winter was wonderful.
 And anything was better than this stifling hot,
humid summer, when the sun didn’t seem to want
to show its face and hid behind a thick haze or
clouds. This wasn’t how summer was supposed to
be—there should be bright days and rainy ones, not
these endless smothering gloomy days when the
clouds hung overhead but the rain never fell. This
was ugly and exhausting.
It hadn’t rained in weeks, and the crops were
suffering— the water the men were hauling up from
the river would help, but a good cistern-filling rain,
splashing down the mountainside and pooling in
the rocks, would have been better.
Those clouds in the west looked even uglier than
most of this year’s skies. Maybe they would bring
storms, and put an end to this nasty heat—but their
appearance was not promising, and Arlian didn’t
trust them.
His grandfather—his mother’s father; his father’s
father was long dead—stepped out on the rocky
ledge beside them and looked, not down the slope at
the water-haulers he was too old to assist, but out
at the clouds.
“Dragon weather,” he said with a frown.
“Oh, nonsense,” Arlian’s mother said. “You’ve
been saying that for weeks. It’s just a hot spell.”
“Isn’t that what dragon weather is, Mother?”
Arlian asked. “A hot spell?”
His mother glanced at her father.
“Not just the heat,” the old man said. “Look at
that sky—hot as a furnace and days dark as night,
that’s dragon weather. You need the heat and the
dark. If those clouds move in and settle here, that’s