"Boyer, Elizabeth - Thrall And The Dragon's Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Boyer Elizabeth)

"What do you want?" she whispered. "This isn't the sort of place for travelers. You'd better go back the way you came, quickly, before something terrible happens to you."
"What? What sort of hospitality is this?" Pehr demanded. "We're cold and hungry and lost besides and wouldn't know where to go back to if we wanted to. We were going to Vigfusstead, but we can't go any farther in this storm. Where's the master of the house?"
A voice from within sent the girl scuttling away. The door was snatched open by a heavy hand, and a large, stocky woman in poor, dirty clothing scowled out at Pehr and Brak.
For a moment she stared grimly, then said, "Well, you'll have to come in, then. I'll send my shepherd to look after your beasts. Mind you, we're not used to guests here, so you needn't expect to be treated like kings." As she turned away, she went on, muttering, "If you knew what place this was, you'd probably rather sleep in the snow. On your heads be any misfortune that befalls you here."
Brak looked at Pehr, not quite able to believe what he thought he had heard, but Pehr didn't seem alarmed. The place certainly promised an uncomfortable night. Two wretched rooms with an attic leaned against a greasy-smelling old hut where the food was prepared. A heap of untanned sheep fleeces along one wall filled the place with a strong smell of sheep, as well as furnishing the old woman a bed. The serving girl probably slept in the kitchen, and the ill-favored shepherd, who skulked out the door to care for the horses, smelled as if the barn were more home to him than the house.
The girl edged into the room with a large, black pot steaming with a muttony fragrance. Eying the two strangers distrustfully, she hurried back for two large wooden bowls, which she flung on the table with a clatter. A loaf of rather stale bread and a knife were added to the feast, followed by the grudging addition of a lump of goaty-smelling cheese.
The old woman sat down with a wad of wool at a spinning wheel, watching her guests eat their food. Her eye was grim and somehow speculative. The silence in the small house was formidable. Brak tried not to look at her lest he lose his appetite, which was already experiencing difficulties with the rubbery boiled mutton and greasy broth.
Suddenly the old woman leaned forward to inspect her guests more piercingly. "Did you pass by way of the barrows as you were coming here?" she demanded.
"We did," Pehr replied, spearing a large piece of mutton out of the pot and fussily cutting the fat off it. "A lot of people would try to tell us some frightening old tales about ghosts and strange lights and such nonsense. I disbelieve all this magical stuff myself."
The old woman snorted. "When you're as old as I am, you'll come to believe a great many things that you laugh at now, my fine young man. Ever since I've lived in the shadows of the barrows, I've seen a mort of strange things." She shook her head until her jowls quivered, and her pale eyes fixed them with a deathly glare.
"And may you live to see many more of the same," Brak said nervously, in an effort to appease her.
"Ha! I may not live out this night!" She said it with much satisfaction and hunched herself up in her shawl, pursing her lips as if no one could ever wring another word from her. Under the cover of viciously harrowing up the fire, she muttered, "And neither may one of you."
Brak's ears, sharpened with apprehension, caught what the old crone had said. He clutched at Pehr's arm and whispered, "Pehr, I don't think we should stay here. She keeps muttering under her breath about awful things. Let's leave, shall we? I'd rather sleep outside than with all the lice and ticks in those old fleeces."
"Hush! It wouldn't be polite," Pehr whispered angrily.
"Polite? Who worries about that when you're scared to death?" Brak's eyes darted around the room, lighting upon the most ordinary things with horror, as if they were instruments of torture instead of farming and weaving implements.
"Don't be so superstitious," Pehr answered, but even he jumped when the old woman suddenly uttered a loud chuckle in the midst of her scowling contemplation of the fire.
"Superstitious!" Her bright, fierce eyes bored into Pehr and Brak. "That's what you call it, eh? You young sprats know nothing about the old ways of knowledge. Superstition, indeed!" She finished with a cackle, a rusty sound that raised Brak's every hair to stiff attention.
She continued to snort and chuckle throughout the rest of their meal. When they were finished, she pointed to the fleeces. "You can sleep there as well as anywhere, I suppose, and I shall take the loft."
Dubiously, Brak measured her bulk against the rather flimsy ladder ascending through the low ceiling.
"Bar the doors, and if you've got any sense you'll bury your heads and pretend you hear or see nothing, in case anything should happen."
"What exactly are we to expect?" Pehr inquired with some annoyance, but the reply was a huffy grunt as the old woman crept up the ladder like a fat black spider climbing a strand of its web. She took the smoky tallow lamp with her, leaving her two guests in the dying glow of the meager fire.
"Now we can leave," Brak whispered, flinching when the fire popped.
Pehr prodded at the fleeces with one foot, then arranged his cloak in the far opposite corner and lay down on it. "You're being absurd, Brak. Given a basic disbelief in magic, what is there that she can do to us? I'll protect us well enough with this." He laid his short sword close at hand and looked at it proudly. Thorsten had given it to him last month for his birthday. Pehr had practiced diligently with Thorsten's oldest retainer, a one-eyed fellow Brak thought was surely ancient enough to have battled against the scraelings seven hundred years ago, when the Sciplings first set foot on Skarpsey's rugged shores.
Brak sighed, watching Pehr making himself comfortable for the night. Gingerly, Brak sat down on the stiff sheep fleeces in the deepening gloom and drew his cloak up to his chin. He had no delusions about bravery and cowardice. He knew he was a coward from his bones outward, including each carefully nurtured layer of loyal plumpness, which would someday become sturdy, faithful corpulence when Pehr was chieftain of his father's Quarter.
"You always get us into these awful messes," he grumbled, after he was quite sure Pehr was sound asleep. "Sometimes I think I might live longer as a poor fisherman. I certainly never asked to swear fealty to Pehr Thorstensson. It's been nothing but trouble ever since. Barrow mounds, haunted stones, and now a haunted house."
A soft, scratching sound sent him cringing into his cloak, except for his eyes, which glared around in terror. He saw the fleece nailed over the kitchen door stir slightly, and the small serving girl called Grima came creeping stealthily from her lair. Instantly Brak had visions of himself being murdered right before his own eyes.
"What do you want?" he asked, his voice quaking. "Go away, get back to whatever place you came out ofЧplease!" It did him no good to notice that she was scarcely half his size and as thin and delicate as a wood shaving.
"You're the ones who must go away," she whispered. "A dreadful curse abides here; if you don't leave this house, you'll find yourselves victims of it by midnight. Don't ask any questions, just gather your things and go."
"I'd like to, but I can't. My chieftain Pehr thinks it would be a breach of hospitalityЧand superstitious besides. You're quite certain of the curse on this house?"
The girl nodded, her eyes lost in dark shadow. "Then you must desert him if he won't go. I assure you, the curse is as real as the wart on Katla's chin."
"I can't desert Pehr, I fear," Brak said unhappily. "Exactly what sort of curse is it, may I ask, and what kind of danger are we in?"
The girl shook her head, and pale hair gleamed under the edges of her ragged kerchief. "I can't tell you. If Katla knew I tried to warn you away, she'dЧ" A heavy creak from upstairs silenced her. Shaking her head and holding up a warning finger, she started scuttling back toward the kitchen.
Brak caught her wrist, dropping it hastily, amazed at his own temerity. In a whisper he asked, "Are you in some sort of awful trouble? Can IЧbe of any help to you?"
The girl stared at him and seemed to be of a mind to laugh. Then she favored him with a quick, sad smile, saying, "No, I don't think you can, but it's most kind of you to ask. If you only knewЧno, then you wouldn't want to help me. I wish you'd slip away before it's too late." Her whisper followed her as she glided away into the darkness of the sordid kitchen.
Brak struggled between the resolve to bestir Pehr immediately and get him out of danger and the fear of the wrath and derision of his friend at being awakened from a sound sleep to listen to Brak's ridiculous and definitely backward superstitious anxieties. All the common working folk on Skarpsey possessed a healthy respect for magic and magical beings; doubt was reserved for the educated and wealthy, who had little to do with the vast, lonely fells and isolated valleys. With a small sigh, Brak picked up Pehr's sword and propped himself watchfully against the wall. The sword in his hand was as comforting to him as if it were a live, poisonous snake. Earnestly he hoped nothing would happen to prove his cowardice to an even greater extent.
From time to time he added chips of wood and dry dung to the fire to keep the room somewhat lighted. He wanted to see the menace before it throttled or murdered him, although even a vengeful, bloodthirsty draug would have second thoughts about sallying from its grave on such a night.
He pinched himself to stay awake until he was numb and almost delirious. He wished the small creaks and squeaks and sighs he heard would frighten him awake, but sleep had dulled even his overdeveloped sense of self-preservation. In spite of himself, he nodded and dozed, slumping against the wall with the sword across his knees. For no reason, he suddenly awoke, glaring around wildly with the knowledge that something was wrong. The air felt disturbed, as if something had just brushed past him. Turning his head, he saw that Pehr was gone. For a moment Brak could only gape, listening to his heart hammering with the terror of being abandoned in Katla's evil clutches. Then he persuaded his quaking limbs to rise and creep toward the door, which was not completely closed. Fearing all manner of gruesome sights, he peered through the crack, not daring to risk breathing.
He saw a cloaked and hooded figure mounting a tall horse and turning it away to ride out of the yard. Brak fell back and began scrambling his possessions together, picking up one thing and dropping it to seize another. Deserting him in such an awful place was exactly Pehr's idea of a fine joke, which he could tell everyone back at Thorstensstead to make them all laugh. It would be a great story; the best ones always were at Brak's expense. Brak finally managed to fasten his cloak and grab his boots, letting himself outside as quietly as he could, stumbling in his haste over Katla's spinning wheel, left treacherously to ensnare the unwary, like a large, predatory insect.
Brak hurried to the stable, where no one seemed to be awake. He fastened Faxi's bridle with shaking hands, trotting his horse out without the saddle, and followed the tracks the other horse had made in the snow. The storm had left the sky clear and cold, glittering with stars and half a moon, which offered ample light for following Pehr's tracks. Pehr would tease him and complain about going back for his saddle, but Brak resigned himself to it in advance, rather than enduring a night alone in that house.
He followed the tracks to the top of a hill and down the other side, where he discovered a hodgepodge of tracks, as if the horse had galloped up and down several times. To his dismay, he couldn't decipher which way Pehr had gone. Tracks led away in all directions; after attempting to follow several sets of them, he could no longer tell Faxi's tracks from the original ones.
As he sat pondering, he heard a horse whinny behind him, toward the north. Gladly he set off in pursuit, urging Faxi to trot a little faster.
"Pehr, you're going too far for a joke!" he muttered, seeing that the tracks led straight toward the barrow mounds. Jolting and muttering along on Faxi's knobby spine, he tried to persuade himself not to follow Pehr to the barrows. He knew Pehr would be waiting to spring out at him and scare him, and even that knowledge wouldn't make the fright any less when it came. Unhappily he urged Faxi as close to the barrows as the animal would go, and then he got off and led him, cajoling and comforting the old horse.
"Pehr? Where are you? I know you're going to leap out at me with a horrible scream any moment, and I promise I'll nearly faint, so why don't you get it over with? We can go on to Vigfusstead by moonlight."
He listened for any slight betraying sound, but he heard nothing except the hissing of the wind among the upright doorposts and lintels. With a sigh, Brak tugged Faxi after him, following the hoofprints further into the cluster of barrow mounds. Faxi shook his head and made disapproving grunts and groans as he plodded reluctantly after Brak. The hoofprints led toward the largest barrow, which bristled with a ring of stones on its flat top. Brak shivered, suddenly feeling cold and alone in a place where he had no business.
"Pehr!" he shouted. "I'm going back now! You're going to miss out on scaring me and telling everyone about it! Do you hear, Pehr? This is no place for jokes, especially in the middle of the night!"
Still there was no answer. Brak waited, then began following the tracks again, muttering to himself. When he looked up again, he was nearly at the foot of the large barrow. The tracks led straight to the gaping, black entrance and vanished between the two tall doorposts. Unwillingly Brak approached the doorway, smelling the musty breath of the barrow and prickling all over with creeping gooseflesh.
"Pehr!" he called. "This isn't funny. I know you didn't go inside that barrow, so there's no way you'll get me into it. I'm going back, Pehr. I'll meet you at Vigfusstead."
This time he heard a faint sound in answer, an echoing clatter of stone from inside the barrow.
"I'm not going in there," Brak said to Faxi, bending his head for a look into the absolute blackness of the barrow. "I don't know why I do these things for Pehr. I'm sure he doesn't appreciate half the trouble I go toЧ" His words trailed off, echoing in the waiting darkness below. Brak had been forced to crawl into earthy barrows with Pehr many times to search for treasure, or merely to defy any lingering curses, but none of those sadly decayed little chambers had ever echoed. Brak made a small, quavering hoot and listened to the sound rebounding as if in a vast cavern. With an unsteady hand, he felt around the doorposts and discovered walls of hewn stone. Before his feet was a flight of steps leading down into the earth. Brak stepped back, leaning against his horse for support. Something unnatural awaited him, something more frightening than Pehr leaping out of the shadows with a terrifying yell in his ear. Pehr had already gone down into that strange darkness before him, and it was his duty to follow, however much against his better judgment.
Moving one leaden leg at a time, he stepped into the barrow and felt his way down the stairs. Faxi followed him with a little encouragement, his hooves clopping softly on the steps and his speckled nose nudging Brak along from behind.