"Liz Williams - Debatable Lands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)

DEBATABLE LANDS
by Liz Williams

Liz Williams’s forthcoming books include Precious Dragon and The
Shadow Pavilion (both from Night Shade). One of her most recent
novels, Banner of Souls (Bantam Spectra, 2006), is currently
nominated for the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. It was also a
finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke award. The author’s contribution to
our annual slightly spooky October/ November issue may look a
little like fantasy and a little like horror, but it’s all science fiction.

****

He chased it through the rushes at the water’s edge, late spring, with the
dark-mist twilight coming down around him. It was as though he had been
chasing it lifelong, all through the racing years of childhood, past the time
when he was initiated as a warrior and warlord’s man, past the battles of
Cadon and Burn, the years of love and the years of war. He knew that it was
barely a short span since the hounds had put up the scent and begun the
chase, but that was what it felt like. And already he was exhausted by it,
bone weary, as though the day was already at its end. The thing he was
chasing had sapped him: he could feel it sipping at his strength, leaching
into marrow and sinew, spooling him out like the thread from a dropped
spindle. Then it raised its unnatural head and gave a pealing cry and the
sound brought him to his knees.

He was somewhere else. There were towers all around, made of red
stone, higher than any building he had ever seen before. They reached up
into cloudy greyness, rain on the way, and he felt dizzy and disconnected.
Hastily he looked down and around. He stood on a grassy circle but the
grass was not green, as it should be, but yellow and sere, as though the
summer had been hot and long. It did not feel like summer to him, but there
were no trees to show him the season.

There was, however, a plank of wood on a ball, tilted so that one end
of the plank rested on the ground. A smaller plank hung from a frame,
creaking in the rising wind. He blinked. A child was sitting on the plank,
swinging to and fro. The child was staring at him, her face as blank as an
egg.

“Where am I?” he cried. “What is this place?”

But the child’s face cracked and she laughed and laughed, not kind
laughter but cold, and he knew her for one of the Changing, or thought he
did. Then the child and the towers were gone and there were only the
rushes and the marsh’s edge, with the wind whistling through the reeds.

That night, he dreamed of Less Britain.

He had been born there, on the sea’s edge. First memories were of