"Ball, Margaret - Shadow Gate, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ball Margaret)

Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis
The storm that had darkened the fringes of Berengar's lands had moved on by the time he reached St.-Remy, and at first the village looked as peaceful as any place might, with the harvest interrupted by a rain that beat the standing grain
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50 Margaret Ball
to the ground and a wind that tossed the garnered sheaves into hedge and ditch. The villagers were out again in the pale sunlight that followed die storm, squelching over muddy fields to salvage what they could after the disaster. One house had lost its thatch, and there were splashes of mud and broken branches about the churchyard to attest to the storm's fury, but all else seemed peaceful enough. Berengar drew in the mare to a walk and observed the scene from die shelter of the great trees at the edge of the clearing.
One woman, her arms full of broken sheaves and her gown dragging behind her in the mud, glanced up and saw Berengar and let out a cry that drew the other villagers. Her cheeks were stained with tears. She threw herself down beside his stirrup, clutching his leg and begging for something in a thick unintelligible dialect made worse by die sobs that choked her.
"SoftlyЧsoftly, now!" Berengar dismounted clumsily, trying to shake himself free of the woman without kicking her. When he had both feet on the ground he patted her damp coif and tried to get her to slow down so that he could understand what was troubling her.
"Take me away!" she begged. "Please, m'lord, before they come backЧ"
Then her voice was drowned out by all the villagers arriving in a mass, shouting, crying, complaining in a cacophony that made Berengar's ears ring. Some babbled of hounds and hunters, some of their own people ridden down, odiers seemed to have some complaint about the priest, and mostly they just cried for help.
"Peace! Peace, friends!" Berengar shouted, waving one arm in a great commanding circle to sweep them into silence. "What happened here?" He saw the village priest standing at the back of the crowd. Good, at least there was one man with a litde wit
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and learning to tell him a straight story. "You, FatherЧSimon, is it?"
The man advanced through a crowd that parted silently to let him pass. The peasants averted their faces and the woman who'd been gleaning broken sheaves drew aside her muddy gown as if the holy man's touch could defile it worse than the dirt that already stained the hem.
"I warned them, my lord." Father Simon bobbed his head obsequiously several times, tonsured pate shining in the pale rain-washed sunlight. "I tried to warn them, but they wouldn't heed me until it was too late. Luckily there were only two injuredЧ"
"WarnЧthemЧofЧwhat?" said Berengar in a voice made dangerous by the control he forced upon it.
The priest swallowed and licked his lips nervously, 'The Hunt, my lord-^the Wild Hunt. Oh, aye, I know it's heresy to believe in such thingsЧ but, my lord, the great churchmen who decide what is heresy, they live in the cities, in fine stone towers with tiled roofs. You wouldn't find such a one as die Pope, or our own Bishop Rotrou for that matter, risking himself out in the forest on a day like diis. But I heard them, my lord."
"We've all heard the Hunt," chimed in Arn of die Bridge, "but always at night it was, when honest Christian men and women are indoors where diey should be. Now it's come in the day. How's us going to work the fields, m'lord, if die Hunt can savage us at high noon?" What are you going to do about it? his truculent tone demanded.
"Tell me," said Berengar, "exactly what happened, and then we will decide what to do about it. Are you sure it was the Wild Hunt? The diunderstormЧ lightningЧsometimes die sounds are frightening, more so when unexpected. ..."
"I saw diem," insisted Arn stubbornly.
"And I," piped up a boy at die fringe of die crowd.
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"Riding behind their shadow-hounds, all in armor
like . . ."
"Brigands?" Berengar suggested with dying hope.
"Skeletons in armor," Arn said firmly. "And the hounds like shadows on the grass. And they took one of us, m'lord. My own daughter, poor little Maud, couldn't run fast enough, poor crippled soul!"
Something in the man's tone rang false to Berengar. As he recalled, this Arn was a widower who'd beaten and badgered his wife to an exhausted death for the sin of having produced only one daughter, and that one crippled. Since then he complained unceasingly of the injustice of life that had saddled him with an ugly lame girl whom nobody would ever take off his hands. Now he was sniffling and wiping the back of one grimy hand across his face. Berengar was willing to wager that the grief was feigned. But there was some strong feeling there. Fear. Hie man was afraid; his hand shook and he kept glancing up at the sky as if expecting another attack.
"She could have taken shelter in the forest," Berengar suggested.
"No!" cried the woman who'd first approached him. "I saw them take herЧrode down the elf-boy, they did, to get at her, and the poor lad throwing fire and light at them with ah1 his strength to the lastЧ"
She stopped and shrank back, fist pressed against her mouth.
"Kieran?" said Berengar in a voice he no longer recognized as his own. "Kieran here, and wounded, and none of you thought to tell me? Where is he?"
Arn of the Bridge glanced towards a shabby hut at the edge of the fields, and Berengar pushed past the man and covered the muddy distance in a few strides.
The door hung open on torn leather hinges; inside the windowless hut Berengar could just see Kieran's limp form laid on the bare ground. He touched the
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opal in the hilt of his bronze knife and the elflight blazed forth, a rainbow of colors and dancing lights.
Kieran's silvergilt hair was muddy with blood and his face was pale and cold as ice. Berengar felt a squeezing pain deep in his chest; then Kieran's head moved slightly, he mumbled something unintelligible and his eyes flew open.
"My lordl My lordЧ"
"Be still, lad. Don't try to get up," Berengar commanded. He knelt beside his fosterling and felt along the bloody locks of hair with the lightest touch he could summon. There was a nasty welt rising on Kieran's head, and a long gash in his scalp had bled copiously enough to terrify Berengar for a moment, but it seemed no worse a knock than any mortal boy might have taken on the tilting grounds. He felt his own breath returning, strong and sweet with life, with each breath that Kieran took; and only now, when he began to feel safe, could he acknowledge the hurt he would have taken if the boy had been lost.
"You mad brat," he said with the beginnings of a smile, "did you think to hold off an army of the dead with nothing but your two fists full of elflight, and you not full come into your powers yet? Next time save your strength to call me or my castle guard, child."
"I should have done that," Kieran acknowledged. "Ah1 I could think of was that the village should be warned, and they're all mortals, my lordЧno one could have heard my call. I ran here as fast as I could . . ." His face screwed up with the effort of holding back tears.
"Rest easy, brat." Berengar tousled his hair, carefully staying away from the rising lump on the boy's forehead. "I'm not one to fault you for thinking first of your duty; only, next time, think whether you can do that duty best by yourself, or by calling for help."
"I failed," Kieran said.
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"The villagers seem hale enough to me," Berengar remarked. "Cowards, and hysterical, and probably lying their heads off, but what can you expect of mortals?"
Kieran's head shifted from side to side. "They took Maud."
"Who? OhЧthe bridgekeeper's girl?"
"I promised to protect her," Kieran whispered painfully, "and I failedЧand now Herluin has her soul."
"I think," Berengar said, "you had better tell me exactly what happened."
As the whispered tale went on, Berengar's face set in grim, un-elven lines. At the sad conclusion, when Kieran related how Herluin's ice-shod horse had overridden him and knocked the sense out of him long enough to stop the flicker of elflight, while the army of the dead behind Herluin dived in and surrounded Maud, Berengar stood abruptly and lifted Kieran in his arms.