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

No one was there.

It came again and it was desolate, a spirit’s cry. He reached for the
charm around his neck, hazel bound with bronze to keep him safe from fire
and water, and he thought it had worked because the cry was cut off,
suddenly, as if choked. Then he swung the oar, took the coracle around a
bend in the channel into a wide flat pool, and saw it.

It looked like death. It was all sinew and bone, with more legs than a
natural beast, and a face made of spines, that as he stared, aghast, shifted
to become something else, something human and ancient and sad. Then it
bounded high in the air. He saw a twisting tail, ending in a spiked club, and
all of it was the color of summer roses, or the inside of a dead man on the
battlefield’s earth. It was gone and he was left gaping after it.

He knew then that his initiation was complete: he had seen what he
was supposed to see, yet he did not know what that was. He could not take
this for his totem; it was no natural thing. And so, wondering, he paddled the
coracle back through the channel of reeds, to the banks of alder through
which a white sun was rising.

It was early, but he had seen enough. There was a bursting pressure
in his head, the sense of a summer storm. He put his hands to his ears to
block out thunder, then realized that it was within. It was not until he
stumbled back into the alder groves that the pressure lessened and even
then his head rang to the end of the day.

The high king’s oak-man was silent, when he spoke of what he had
seen. At first, Curlew thought that he was not believed. But yarrow thrown
smoldering into the fire sent smoke into the oak-man’s rafters and the
oak-man passed a knife across the palm of Curlew’s hand and proclaimed
him a man of the high court.
 That night, the high king asked him to tell the court what he had seen.
He did so grudgingly, but the warriors did not laugh; something about his
quietness, perhaps, or the black haunt in his eyes. The thing he had seen
had left a scar on his soul, something he did not want to tell the other
warriors, but perhaps they saw it in him all the same.

His account of the creature, his quest beast, excited them. Knives
were stuck into the tabletop; toasts were made. The king watched with
guarded interest; by his side, Whiteshadow’s face was avid. They wanted
to set out that night, run the beast to ground in the marshes, capture it and
bring it back—living or dead, or so the head of the king’s warriors boasted.
Curlew did not think that was as easy a choice as it might seem, but he said
nothing.

The king was indulgent, but held them back. Curlew, watching the
king’s face closely, thought he saw something pass across it, a shadow like
the knowledge of a man’s death, but he was not sure. The king was a young
man, who looked old, and Curlew did not know what the king had or had not