Читать книгу The Secrets of Names. Snow Chronicles. Book 1 - Ар'лан ис'Дрекхэм - Страница 11

By now they had been walking for quite a long time, though quite a long time was not a very reliable expression here, and possibly a little impolite.

In a world with no time, there were still such things as tiredness, curiosity, unease, and that peculiar sensation belonging to journeys: the feeling that one has come a very great distance, although on turning round one still sees the same slope, the same river of light, the same row of thin towers on the horizon. Vera looked back several times, and each time had the same strange impression. The landscape did not repeat itself, exactly, but neither did it quite change. It was as if it remembered what it had been a moment ago and did not want to lose it.

The path beneath their feet was pale and steady now – not fragile, as it had seemed at first, but firm, with a muted inward glow, as if the snow there had lain for a long time and had become not simply snow but something rather like habit.

«Why doesn’t it melt?» Vera asked, looking down.

«What exactly?» said Domino lazily.

«Well, for one thing it’s glowing. And where I come from, anything glowing is usually either blinking or broken.»

«A very human observation,» said Yang.

Yin, drifting a little ahead, answered, «Because it is not snow in your sense. Not matter, but meaning. Information. What has fallen out of the stream and held.»

«The meaning of what?»

«Everything,» said Yang. «Traces. What was named. What was lived. What was passed on. Anything that didn’t vanish immediately.»

«And all of that falls from above?» Vera tipped back her head.

The sky over them was deep and iridescent, with no sun, no moon, and no familiar source of light. It offered no explanation at all. It behaved as all truly large things do: existing with such calm assurance that a human being beside it becomes embarrassed by her own fuss.

«From above comes the new,» said Yin. «Not all of it. But much. In the upper layers the snow falls more often, and more brightly. There things are born faster, alter faster, forget their old shapes faster.»

«And lower down?»

Yin turned her head slightly, as if listening not to Vera’s question but to the world itself.

«Lower down is what has held. What has passed through many people and not come apart. Old ideas. Obstinate forms. Long meanings. Things that no longer shine very brightly, but carry weight.»

«And lower still,» said Domino, «is somewhere you have no need to go. Not yet.»

He said it in such a tone that to ask any more would have been either brave or silly. And Vera, though she was exactly at the age when bravery and silliness often arrive together, remained quiet.