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

the salt wind whipping his face, the ocean thundering in and lashing against
the granite cliffs until exhausted into froth. His father had died young, in
Broceliande, but Broceliande was too often a word they used when they did
not want you to know how a man had died, the magic in the name weaving a
spell over blood and shattered bone, making death into music. A forest
code, and he had never found out how his father had met his end.

His mother had gone under the protection of his uncle shortly
afterward—not willingly, but she had little choice and he had rejoiced,
seeing his uncle’s fort as a safe place, true, but also the court in which he
would become a man. He had been made welcome, his mother less so,
and as she faded and sank in the shadows of the tower, he was trained in
arms. There was little doubt as to what kind of man he would be: a warrior,
but silent-souled, loving the woods and marshes, the sea’s edge, solitude.
When he took his totem, it was not raven or gull, but curlew, the sad cry in
the dark, always at the edge of things. The other boys, and, later, men,
recognized this: he was left alone.

When he was thirteen, he killed his first man, a raider from the
northeast. By the time he was seventeen, he had killed more, a man for
every year of his age. Shortly after that, the call came from the High Court
and he left the sea-churned shores and the cold cliffs for the milder, wetter
marshlands around the island kingdoms, in Britain-the-More.

He was initiated, all the same. They sent him out into the lake villages,
the lands that had belonged to the king’s queen Whiteshadow, that she had
brought with her as dowry. He saw the marsh homes of the small dark
people, the ones who had been there since time began and the moon was
set on its track. He did not understand them, and they did not trust him,
although they admired the iron spear he carried and he saw them looking at
it with longing. They were covered in blue markings, allowing them to
disappear against the reeds and the coiling mist. He painted himself with
the same, and went out into the marsh when the early sun was a brass
circle in the east.

That was when he saw the thing, but that came later. When he first
took the coracle out into the rushes that marked the channel, a curlew flew
across his path, calling its ghost-cry, and he knew it would be a good killing
day. He speared a heron shortly after that, laying its striped corpse on the
slats of the coracle, admiring the beauty of it. Then a crested duck, but
never the totem he was seeking: hunting was a pastime, nothing more, but it
was preparation for the initiation feast. He had no intention of being
unsuccessful.

He heard it before he saw it. At first he thought it was one of the
booming birds that rose like reeds, with their necks stretched up from the
marsh. It was a long, belling cry, similar to bird or hound, but with a strange
pattern to it, like someone crying out in a language that he did not
understand. Maybe it was one of the lake people themselves, come
stealing after him to take the iron spear, and he jolted round in the coracle.