Tanith Lee - Moonblind

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 48.41KB 18 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

by Tanith Lee,

Yet once more, from an idea by John Kaline.

To Hunt the Other you must

become The Other. But if you lose

your way back to yourself,

what have you become?

His mother kept the inn, and he was a child when he saw it first,

the Hunt. Evading his chores, he had escaped into a high loft, from

where he found it easy enough to climb out on the roof. He lay along

the thatch, looking down into the stony yard before the inn-house.

Sunset had begun, the sky that night red from end to end. As the

riders and the dogs assembled, all redness fell and caught on them,

as if they had been doused in a shower of freshest blood.

There were 30 men, 30 horses, and 60 dogs.

The inn-maids went round with the cups of drink, finest silver

cups, somewhat dented, that the inn kept solely for those 12 nights.

Even on the roof, the child could smell the strong wine, and the

pungency of spice and herbs stirred in.

He noted the powerful horses, and especially the dogs. These

hounds were white and gray, long-haired, long-nosed, and bone-slim

on long legs. All the men seemed loud and laughing, cracking jokes.

Respected and revered, still they would boast of their participation in

a Hunt. Already the child had heard how such men. wherever they

went, whatever their birth or station in life, were treated like lords.

Next the red sky changed to a clear plum darkness, and the

moon came up over the woods, round and white, with freckles on

her surface. The Hunt saluted the moon, standing in their stirrups.

Then they slung the drained cups away, as if worthless, ringing

on the stones, and turning their horses' heads, at a sudden gallop

raced from the yard, among a streaming torrent of dogs.

It was as they left the light and shadow of the inn that the

moonlight instead caught them. What had flashed and dripped

scarlet at sunfall now blazed up like a bonfire of molten silver. On

the roof, the boy was dazzled, eyes and brain. Ten years later,

dazzled still, he presented himself to the Hunt Master in the Big

House on the hill.

"You'd be happier — and far more safe — staying on in your

family's inn."

"So I've heard, but here I am."

"What of your poor mother? Don't you care how she'll fear for

you? How will she manage if you're killed?"

"She'll manage. And I don't care a jot."

Perhaps approving his impudence, the Hunt Master called his

servant. He had the boy sent at once to undergo the proper tests.

They were difficult and terrible, and he passed them all. By the time

he was 18, Kevariz, the inn-woman's son, was himself a member of

the Hunt.

Kevariz sat drinking at the inn.

He was 29 years old, and it was the night before Full Moon, and

Tyana expected him home. However, his mother had said she

wished to see him. Now, if he came to see his mother, . it was

always a visit, an occasion. He had brought her a rose-phnt in a pot,

and a little silver luck charm to hang on the rafters. She could brag

that her son, who rode with the Hunt, had given it to the inn-house

— but he doubted she would. After the third tankard, he went up the

cranky stair to her room above. Of course he had been up here since

his youth, but the room seemed every time more alien to him.

Perhaps, even as a boy of nine or ten, it had been so — and all of the

inn the same. He had thought himself made for another destiny.

"Mother. You're looking well."

"Yes, you prefer me to be well. It lessens your guilt in leaving

me." He put down the rose and the talisman beside it. She nodded.

"Thank you," she said, stiff and cold. "You sent your boy for me."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Tanith Lee - Moonblind.pdf

共18页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Tanith Lee - Moonblind

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: