"Banks, Iain - Song of Stone, A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banks Iain M)

The lieutenant appears at the main keep door, sauntering towards us, wearing a new tunic top; a vividly red jacket strung about with bright ropes of gold and studded with medal ribbons. She holds a bottle of our best champagne, already opened.

'There,' she says, looking around at the courtyard walls. 'Not much damage done.' She smiles at you. 'Like my new outfit? She spins once for us; the red dress jacket swings out.

She fastens a couple of the buttons. 'This was your grandfather's or something?' she asks..

'Some relation; I forget which,' I tell her evenly, as old Arthur, patently the most venerable of our servants, appears at the door with a tray and makes his way slowly towards us.

The lieutenant smiles indulgently at the old man and indicates he should put the tray on the bonnet of one of the jeeps. There are three glasses. 'Thank you ... Arthur, isn't it?' she says.

The old fellow rotund, bespectacled, flush faced, head sparsely yellow haired looks uncertain; he nods to the lieutenant, then bows and mutters something to us, before hesitating and walking away. 'Champagne,' the lieutenant says, laughing, already pouring; the ring which she took from you, now encircling her left small finger, clinks against the thick green bulk of the bottle and the long flutes' delicate stems.

We take our glasses. 'To a pleasant stay,' she says, clinking crystal with us. We sip; she gulps.

'Quite how long do you intend to be with us?' I ask.

She says, 'A while. We've been too long on the road, in fields and barns, dossing in half burnt houses and damp tents. We need some leave from all this soldiering; it gets to you after a while.' She swills her drink around, gazing at it. 'I can see why you left, but we can defend a place like this.'

'We could not,' I agree. 'That's why we chose to leave. May we leave now?'

,You're safer here, now,' she tells us.

I glance at you. 'Still, we would like to leave. May we?'

'No,' the lieutenant says, and sighs. 'I'd like you to stay.'

She shrugs, makes to inspect her fine tunic. 'It's my wish.' She adjusts a cuff. 'And rank has its privileges.' Het smile is quite, if briefly, dazzling as she glances about. 'We are your guests, and you are ours. We are willingly your guests; how willing you are ours is up to you.' Another shrug. 'But however that may be, we intend to stay here.'

'And if anyone turns up with a tank, what then?'

She shrugs. 'Then we'd have to leave.' She drinks, and moves the wine around in her mouth for a moment before swallowing. 'But there aren't that many tanks around these days, Abel; there isn't much of anything organised, opposition or otherwise, hereabouts just now. A very fluid situation we have at the moment, after all this mobilisation and waging and prosecuting and attrition and . . .' she waves one hand airily, Just general breakdown, I suppose.' She puts her head to one side. 'When did you last see a tank, Abel? Or an aircraft, or a helicopter?'

I think for a moment, then just nod to accede.

I sense you looking up. You grab my arm.

The looters; the three our irregulars discovered inside the castle. They surrendered after a few shots and the lieutenant has apparently been questioning them. Now they appear on the roof above, bundled on to the walkway from the tower above the winding stair by a half dozen of the lieutenant's soldiers. The three have bags or hoods over their heads and ropes round their necks; they stumble and the way they move makes me think they've been beaten; I can hear what sound like sobs and entreaties from inside the dark hoods. They are being led to the castle's two south facing towers, whose bases flank the main gate and look over the bridge and moat towards the front lawns and the drive.

Your eyes are wide, your face pale; the gloved hand clutching at me tightens. The lieutenant drinks, watching you closely, something cold and calibratory about her expression. Then, while you still stare at the line of men on the stone skyline, her face animates, becomes relaxed, even cheerful. 'Let's go
inside, shall we?' She takes up the tray. 'It's getting cold out here, and it looks like rain.'

Above us, as we troop inside, a young man calls out for his mother.

The lieutenant tethers us in a wing, so that we may fly no more. We dine behind locked doors, on bread and salted meats. in the great hall, our captor entertains her troops with all our roaring kitchens can provide. Predictably, they shot the peacocks. I expected a night of wild debauchery from our new guests, but the lieutenant according to the whispers of our servants, as they come, escorted, to deliver and remove our meal has ordered a double guard, no more than one bottle of wine per man, and decreed that our staff and those camping on the lawns be left unmolested. She is wary of attack on this first night, perhaps, and besides her men are weary, with no strength for celebration, only tired relief.

Fires burn in grates, candies flicker before mirrors on manybranched candelabra, and garden torches, unearthed from an outbuilding, burn smokily on walls or stuck in vases, a graceless caricature of medievality.

Meanwhile our looters their lives negated by a knot, and by that length shortened swing in the air from towers, stranded in the evening air as a grim signal to the outside world; perhaps the good lieutenant hopes that their swaying will so sway others. To keep them company, the lieutenant and her men have raised a fitting standard on the flagpole; a little joke, they say. It is the skin of a long dead carnivore they've found; stalked down some long neglected corridor, hunted out within a dusty storeroom then finally cornered inside a creaking trunk. And so the old snow tiger skin flies in the rain troubled air.