"Adams, Robert - Horseclans 07 - Horseclans's Odyssey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Robert)
Protected from the wet by the canvas roof and sidecurtains, from the chill by paddings, pillows and a thick, winter bearskin, the onetime Lord of Kostanispolis sipped delicately from a commodious flask of strong honey wine and mused silently.
"Even if I have to part with every ounce of metal in my beltЕ and one of the drafts besidesЕ my profit on just one of the little darlings will more than reimburse meЕ or should. HmmmЕ let's seeЕ perhapsЕ perhaps, if I sell the less pretty oneЕ say, to a buyer in Kehnooryos Ehlas, and then present the prettier as an outright gift to Lord Thoheeks Nikos, King Zenos' principal adviser. Or should I gift the little bastard to the king himself? No, that's right"Чhe sighed gustily and shook his head of oiled ringletsЧ"like his father before himЧGod grant that that old scumsucker is burning in the deepest pit of Hell!Чthe young king is said to care only for women. Must be the barbarian blood, for he seems a cultured, civilized man in all other respects, from what I've heard. But not to take a pretty little boy now and again? Remarkably uncouth, to say the least!
"So! Then the boy must go to Nikos of Sahpahntispolis, who is at least gentleman enough to appreciateЧto properly appreciateЧthe rarity and value of the gift. Why, this pah are the first Horseclans boys through these parts in years.
"As I recall him, Thoheeks Nikos isЧfor all his other failingsЧa true Ehleen gentleman of the old school, and if he gives value due to value receivedЕ and he must! IЕ I'm dying in this barbarian pesthole!"
Feeling tears starting to well up from his eyes, Urbahnos rumbled for a soft cloth and dabbed lightly at his eye corners, taking great care not to smudge the cosmetics on upper and lower lids or to disarrange his long, curling false eyelashes. Restowing the cloth, he took a long, burning pull at his flask before settling back again to his musings.
"So, then, the prettierЕ probably the younger will be prettierЕ the prettier will go to Nikos, and he must be untried, too, for the tastes of so refined a gentleman, so I had best send him east with Nahseer. Yes, that's perfect." He smiled. "That Zahrtohgahn bastard will butcher anyone who even touches the little sweetling, and, lacking himself any man parts, there'll be no chance of the guardian's being tempted."
Urbahnos had never had cause to regret his purchase of the hulking Nahseer, years before, when the Zahrtohgahn was placed upon the riverside slave block in Pahdookahport. It had been upon the first occasion that the huge man had saved his life and purse from a band of footpadsЧtaking wounds in the process, since, prior to that time, his master had been loath to arm himЧthat the Ehleen had considered manumitting himЕ but he had yet to do so, for all that he frequently used the brown-skinned man to convey and guard especially valuable merchandise to the eastern coastal areasЧfurs, jewels, young and beautiful virgins and the like.
Now in his mid- to late-thirties, Nahseer claimed to have been of a high-caste family of the Kaliphate of Zahrtohgah, a mighty warrior of high rank in the armies of that land and possessed of wealth and power. His downfall, he went on to claim, was his intemperate lust for a girl who chanced to catch the eye of the kahleefah and be taken into his hahreenu Such had been Nahseer's bemusement that he had plotted to take the girl from hahreem, palace and city by a combination of stealth, force and bribery and bear her off to his own faraway cityЧaware that once her flower was taken, the kahleefah would have no interest in her and would, eventually, forgive him, since, in his almost constant state of war, he had far more need of competent captains than of just one among his hundreds of women.
However, as the Fates would have it, someone had betrayed the bold scheme and Nahseer Had been set upon by a host of the kahleefah's guardsmen the moment he dropped from the top of the inner wall to the springy turf of the hahreem garden. Knowing full well his fate if taken alive, the mighty man had drawn both yahtahgahn and long dagger and fought with awesome effect With strictest orders to take the intruder alive, the guardsmen had suffered terribly, taking crippling wounds and death thrusts and deliberately foregoing many opportunities to slay Nahseer in combat.
Finally overcome by force of numbers and sheer exhaustion, Nahseer had been dragged before his ruler. In a foaming rage at the numbers of warriors the prisoner had cost him, as well as at the attempted violation of his hahreem, Kahleefah Yusuf had had Nahseer severely flogged, gelded and sold for a slave to a party of traders from Ohyoh.
Despite the loss of his manhood, Nahseer had proved most intractable. Few of his early masters had owned him long, and all had been glad to see him go, often selling at a hefty loss to speed his departure. Finally, having become infamous and unsellable in all the Kingdom of Ohyoh, a river trader had bought the mass of brown-skinned muscle and bone for a pitiful sum on the speculation that he might bring a decent price in Pahdookahport or Twocityport, where strong male slaves were usually in demand for the oar barges.
Urbahnos surmised that the big man's loyalty to him was the result of his boundless thanks at being spared the long, hideous, drawn-out death sentence that was the lot of slaves and felons doomed to the oar barges. Had anyone told him that in the heart buried within that massive chest the Zahrtohgahn slave to whom he regularly entrusted both life and property hated and despised him, Lord Urbahnos of Kostanispolis would have openly scoffed and forever after have considered that person an idiot and utter fool.
"The lord thoheeks knows what I want, of course," Urbahnos mused on within the swaying litter. "He knows what an injustice was done me by old Zenos, that barbarian-loving, moon-blood-lapping dog turd. After all, I only pinked the ahrkeethoheeks' son. It wasn't my fault he died of black rot, was it? Of course not! And to accuse me of using a poisoned bladeЕ"
Urbahnos almost always conveniently forgot how, on his way to that eleven-years-done duel, he had several times run the full length of his blade into the stinking, well-rotted carcass of a dead pig.
"So, the sooner I get the boy slave to Karaleenos, the sooner I may expect a pardon and a royal recall to my lands and city. Let's seeЕ perhaps Pehtros will buy my house slaves; God knows he needs them. Why he's not long since died of some loathsome disease living in that pigsty is more than I can fathom. I suppose that I really should free Nahseer, but I'll surely need money to reestablish myself in the proper style, and if I can find a buyer willing to pay a really good price for himЕ but I won't sell him to the barge ownersЕ no, not unless the other slaves and the house bring less than they should.
"As for Lylah, I might as well not go back home if I drag along a barbarian wife; no true Ehleen would even spit at me were I to do so monstrous a thing. Besides, we're not really married; barbarian rites aren't legal in any civilized, Ehleen principality that I know of. I'd Sell her for a slave, her and the brats, too, if I thought I could get away with it. But she's freeborn and her parents were citizens of one of those little southern counties, and if the duke found outЕ"
He shuddered, seeing himself overtaken on the trip upriver by one of Duke Tcharlz's fleet of sail-and-oar warships, dragged off the passenger barge and brought in chains back to Pahdookahport, whereЧhis diplomatic immunity be damnedЧthe old pirate would likely rob him of every thrahkmeh he owned in fines, then send him to his death on the benches of a row-barge. No, it would be far better to forgo possible profit and simply throw LylahЧhis once-pretty wife of seven yearsЧand their six children out of the house once it and the furnishings and slaves were all sold and he was ready to start his journey back east to the land of culture and light.
Often Urbahnos wondered just why he had wedded the chit, for what with her producing a child a year and her bouts of moon sickness between brats, his manly needs drove him to spend about as much time and money at the bordellos as he had before he wed. Nor were his forays into the higher-class brothels in any way cheap. The girls were expensive enough, but such few as would even deign to cater to men of cultured tastes and provide boys were astronomical, especially when one took into account the fact that the proffered boys were invariably passive, spiritless and a bit older than he preferredЕ not to mention often ugly and whip-wealed.
Urbahnos still gagged when he thought of that morning, some years back, when he had awakened after an hours-long bout with an almost-new slave boy to find that the little bitch had used a knotted sheet to hang himself from an iron wall sconce. Recalling the contorted face, protruding eyes and bulging, blackened tongue had brought up everything Urbahnos ate or drank for days on end.
After having been for so very long denied a really prime, young, untried love boy, it was perhaps natural for Lord Urbahnos to drift into fantasies of breaking in the other Horse-clans boy, the elder one, of course, not the younger, prettier oneЧthat one must go, untouched, to Karaleenos. So, lost in this pleasurable fantasy, warmed by the honey wine and the bearskin, lulled alike by the swaying of the litter and the patter of the rain, he fell asleep.
For all that the road was in abominable condition and not quite straight in places, mounted men with decent horseflesh between their legs could traverse the full distance between the two cities in under a day, but as the ox-drawn trader wagons never moved fast enough over dry, level ground, it was closer to a two-day journey for them. In the days of the old duke, traders had camped overnight a bit off the road in a sheltered area that had an unfailing spring.
Duke Tcharlz, however, early in his reign, had recognized the possibilities, located a proved entrepreneur and entered into a silent partnership with him, advancing monies from the ducal purse to build, stock and man a sizable, well-built and reasonably comfortable serai in the area around that spring.
The duke had been astute in his choice of a partner. Portuh Frank had proved himself unprincipled and larcenous enough to reap handsome profits from the operation, yet sufficiently intelligent to realize that he was surely being closely watched by one or more of his Employees and that to attempt to cheat the duke would be suicidal.
The main structure of the serai was the counterpart of countless others the length and breadth of the landЧa large, rectangular building of stone and timber, rising two and a half stories over a full cellar and capped with a roof of hand-cut shingles; floored with planks of pine, the serai's main room was fifty feet long and thirty wide, with a huge fieldstone fireplace at either end for heating, all cooking being done in a nearby outbuilding, while the small private rooms on the second floor were heated by individual braziers.
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