"Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman - Dragons Of Summer Flame" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weis Margaret)

to the last drowning breath
given over to memory where poetry comes, solitary.

I heard you were strangers
in the merciful north, that Hylo, Solamnia,

and a dozen unnameable provinces
cleansed you past envy,
past loneliness. Then the waters told me the truth:

how much you remember your deaths
where the halves of a kingdom unite in a lost terrain,

how you pass like moons, red and silver,
your destination celestial west, an alliance of mercy and light.

From the outset the heavens
had this in mind, a passage through darkness and suspect country,

its vanishing point in sunlight
in the air and the earth's
horizons - not drowning, nor the harp's flood.

O you have never forgotten
the bard's immersion, the
country of sleep, the time preceding the birth of the worlds

where all of us waited
in the mothering dark, in the death that the card foretells,

but alone and together you ride
into the dying the dying the story that means we are starting again . . .



Book 1
I
The Landing Party. The Prophecy.
An Unexpected Encounter
 t was hot that morning, damnably hot.
Far too hot for late spring on Ansalon. Almost as hot as midsummer. The two knights, seated in the boat's stern,
were sweating and miserable in their heavy steel armor; they looked with envy at the half-naked men plying the boat's
oars.
The knights' black armor, adorned with skull and death lily, had been blessed by the high cleric, was supposed to
withstand the vagaries of wind and rain, heat and cold. But their Dark Queen's blessing was apparently not responding
to this unsea-sonable heat wave. When the boat drew near the shore, the knights were first out, jumping into the
shallow water, laving the water onto their reddening faces and sun-burned necks. But the water was not particularly
refreshing.
"Like wading in hot soup," one of the knights grumbled, splashing ashore. Even as he spoke, he scrutinized the
shoreline carefully, eyeing bush and tree and dune for signs of life.