（外文电子版资料）Patricia McKillip - The Throme of the Erril of Sherill.pdf

THE THROME OF THE ERRIL OF SHERILL Patricia A. McKillip Illustrated by Julie Noonan Atheneum 1973 New York Copyright © 1973 by Patricia A. McKillip All rights reserved Library of Congress catalog card number 73-76324 ISBN 0-689-30115-4 Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland Stewart, Ltd. Manufactured in the United States of America by H. Wolff, New York Designed by Harriett Barton First Edition To Kathy and Michele and Lorene 1 The Erril of Sherill wrote a Throme. It was a deep Throme, and a dark, haunting, lovely Throme, a wild, special, sweet Throme made of the treasure of words in his deep heart. He wrote it long ago, in another world, a vaguely singing, boundariless land that did not exist within the kingdom of Magnus Thrall, King of Everywhere. The King had Cnites to come and go for him, and churttels to plant and harvest for him, but no Cnite had ever looked up into the winking morning sky and seen Sherill, and no churttel had ever looked at the rich clods of earth between his boots and seen the Erril’s world. Yet the Erril, long, long ago, wrote a Throme of singular and unsurpassed beauty, somewhere in his own land called Sherill, and the dark King of Everywhere desired that Throme. The house of the King was a tall thing of great, thick stones and high towers and tiny slits of windows that gleamed at night when the King paced his hearth stones longing for the Throme. He had a daughter who sat with him and wept and embroidered pictures of the green world beyond the walls, and listened to her father think aloud to the pale sunlight or the wisps of candle-flame. “Who knows,” he would say, “Oh, who knows where lies the Th