The Redemption of Althalus. David Eddings

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СКАЧАТЬ Then she yawned again. ‘Did you have any other silly announcements you’d like to make? I’ve finished everything that I have to say’

      The light in the dome overhead began to grow dim.

      ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded sharply.

      ‘Now that I’ve got my fur all nice and neat, I think I’ll take a little nap.’

      ‘You just woke up.’

      ‘What’s that got to do with anything? Since you’re obviously not ready to do what you’re supposed to do, I might as well sleep for a while. When you change your mind, wake me up and we’ll get started.’ And then she settled back down on the thick-furred bison robes and closed her eyes again.

      Althalus spluttered to himself for a bit, but the sleeping cat didn’t so much as twitch an ear. Finally he gave up and rolled himself up in his cloak near the wall where the door had been, and he too went to sleep.

      Althalus held out for several days, but his profession had made him a high-strung sort of man, and the forced inactivity in this sealed room was beginning to fray at his nerves. He walked around the room several times and looked out the windows. He discovered that he could put his hand through them – or his head – quite easily, but when he tried to lean out, something that he couldn’t see was in his way. Whatever that something was kept out the much colder air outside. There were so many things about this room that couldn’t be explained, and the thief’s curiosity finally got the best of him. ‘All right,’ he said to the cat one morning as daylight began to stain the sky, ‘I give up. You win.’

      ‘Of course I won,’ she replied, opening her bright green eyes. ‘I always do.’ She yawned and stretched sinuously. ‘Now why don’t you come over here so that we can talk?’

      ‘I can talk from right here.’ He was a little wary about getting too close to her. It was clear that she could do things he couldn’t understand, and he didn’t want her to start doing them to him.

      Her ears flicked slightly and she lay back down. ‘Let me know when you change your mind,’ she told him. And then she closed her eyes again.

      He muttered some choice swear-words, and then he gave up, rose from the bench beside the table and went to the fur-robed bed. He sat down, reached out rather tentatively and touched her furry back with his hand to make sure that she was really there.

      ‘That was quick,’ she noted, opening her eyes again and starting to purr.

      ‘There’s not much point in being stubborn about it. You’re obviously the one who’s in control of things here. You wanted to talk?’

      She nuzzled at his hand. ‘I’m glad you understand,’ she said, still purring. ‘I wasn’t ordering you around just to watch you jump, Althalus. I’m a cat for now, and cats need touching. I need to have you near me when we talk.’

      ‘Then you haven’t always been a cat?’

      ‘How many cats have you come across who know how to talk?’

      ‘You know,’ he bantered, ‘I can’t for the life of me remember the last time.’

      She actually laughed, and that gave him a little glow of satisfaction. If he could make her laugh, she wasn’t entirely in control of the situation here.

      ‘I’m not really all that hard to get along with, Althalus,’ she told him. ‘Pet me now and then and scratch my ears once in a while, and we’ll get along just fine. Is there anything you need?’

      ‘I’ll have to go outside to hunt food for us before long’, he said, trying to sound casual about it.

      ‘Are you hungry?’

      ‘Well, not right now. I’m sure I will be later, though.’

      ‘When you’re hungry, I’ll see to it that you have something to eat.’ She gave him a sidelong look. ‘You didn’t really think you could get away that easily, did you?’

      He grinned. ‘It was worth a try.’ He picked her up and held her.

      ‘You aren’t going anywhere without me, Althalus. Get used to the idea that I’m going to be with you for the rest of your life – and you’re going to live for a very, very long time. You’ve been chosen to do some things and I’ve been chosen to make sure you do them right. Your life’s going to be much easier once you accept that.’

      ‘How did we get chosen – and who did the choosing?’

      She reached up and patted his cheek with one soft paw. ‘We’ll get to that later’, she assured him. ‘You might have a little trouble accepting it right at first. Now then, why don’t we get started?’ She hopped down from the bed, crossed to the table, and without any seeming effort leaped up and sat on the polished surface. ‘Time to go to work, pet,’ she said. ‘Come over here and sit down while I teach you how to read.’

      The ‘reading’ involved the translation of stylized pictures, much as it had in Ghend’s Book. The pictures represented words. That came rather easily with concrete words such as ‘tree’, or ‘rock’, or ‘pig’. The pictures that represented concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, or ‘honesty’, were more difficult.

      Althalus was adaptable – a thief almost has to be – but the situation here took some getting used to. Food simply appeared on the table whenever he grew hungry. It startled him the first few times it happened, but after a while, he didn’t even pay attention to it any more. Even miracles become commonplace if they happen often enough.

      Winter arrived at the edge of the world, and as it settled in, the sun went away and perpetual night arrived. The cat patiently explained it, but Althalus only dimly understood her explanation. He could accept it intellectually, but it still seemed to him that the sun moved around the earth instead of the other way around. With the coming of that endless night, he lost all track of days. When you get right down to it, he reasoned, there simply weren’t any days any more. He stopped looking out the windows altogether. It was almost always snowing anyway, and snow depressed him.

      He was making some progress with his reading. After he’d come across one of the pictures often enough, he automatically recognized it. Words became the center of his attention.

      ‘You weren’t always a cat, were you?’ he asked his companion once when the two of them were lying on the fur-covered bed after they’d eaten.

      ‘I thought I’d already told you that,’ she said.

      ‘What were you before?’

      She gave him a long, steady look with her glowing green eyes. ‘You aren’t quite ready for that information yet, Althalus. You’re fairly well settled down now. I don’t want you to start bouncing off the walls the way you did when you first arrived.’

      ‘Did you have a name – before you became a cat, I mean?’

      ‘Yes. You probably wouldn’t be able to pronounce it, though. Why do you ask?’

      ‘It just doesn’t seem right for me to keep calling you “cat”. That’s like saying “donkey” or “chicken”. Would it upset you if I gave you a name?’

      ‘Not СКАЧАТЬ