"Bradley,.Marion.Zimmer.-.Darkover.-.Clingfire.1.-.Fall.Of.Neskaya.(.With.Deborah.J.Ross)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

Coryn, along with his brother Eddard and three of the smallholders from the rough borderland along the Heights, labored through the day, working their way along the established firebreaks and cutting new ones. Last summer's fires had been smaller than usual, but the winter had been mild. Dense foliage, much of it flammable soapbush, overflowed every open space and gully.
By the next morning, it was clear that the men were spread too thin, the land too vast to clear containment breaks of everything that could burn. As yet, there was no word from High Kinnally. Perhaps it was too soon.
Eddard brought them to the southern hill above the fire to spy out its direction. Timas, the oldest of the smallholders, studied the wind, the dryness of the underbrush, the slope of the hills. He had worked Verdanta's fire-lines since he was a boy.
"Tha'," he pointed up the slope, "and tha'. D'ye see it, m'lord, how the land sits to channel the flame upward, toward the grove?"
Coryn, munching on a handful of nutbread smeared with sour chervine butter, followed the old man's gesture. The wind blew fitfully and at an angle. If it held steady, Timas said, the fire would follow the steeper path to a protected valley where resin-trees and firecone pine crowded together. But if it changed direction ...

The other way, the shallow, easy slope, bore nothing but grass. A spit of bare rock separated the two paths.
Coryn's sight wavered and he sensed the streams of ghostly fire. Images came to him-the wind freshening, shifting. Narrow tongues of fire lapped at the curling grass; it caught, flames racing faster than a galloping horse. Seeds sent tiny embers aloft as they popped, leaping ahead of the main fire. He saw them land on the rocky spit and as quickly go out. The fire left a crust of black behind it as it leaped along the easy slope.
Coryn's sight raced ahead with the fire. More embers landed on the rocky divide. Beyond his line of vision, the spit narrowed, the rock weakened by years of alternating summer heat and winter freeze. A spiderweave of minute cracks gave rooting to windweed and other quickly growing grasses which sprouted in the spring rains and died as quickly in the heat. A single spark landed-he felt it catch, the sudden flare of the dried windweed tendrils. In the next heartbeat, the fire burned on both sides of the barrier, lapping toward the resin-trees.
If the resin-trees go up, we will lose the entire mountainside. ...
Coryn blinked, realizing that a long moment had gone by.
"-but it will be worse if the fire heads due south," Eddard was saying. "We must not risk the trees."
The old man shook his head, eyes cast down before his lord's heir. "Ye canna' trust the grass," he said stubbornly.
"Timas is right," Coryn said, a bit surprised at how steady his voice sounded. "The fire-it will start with the grass but it won't stay there. Up there past the outcrop ..." Quickly, he described what he had seen. The other men fell silent, listening to him.
"Aye, that's the way of it," the old man said, nodding.

"I've seen sparks leap ten feet or more. Rock, river, firebreak. But you, young lord, how did you know?"
"I-I saw it. It happened just like you said."
"Nay, lad, I said only how the fire could go. One way or t'other, at the beck of the wind."
Coryn lifted his chin and faced his older brother. "It will go that way. I saw it."
"You believe you did, chiyu." Eddard raked back his dark-red hair, leaving it just as unruly as before. "But if we choose wrongly and leave the resin-trees unprotected-"
"Lord Eddard!" One of the men, who had gone down halfway toward the fire, shouted and pointed. "The wind!"
"Zandru's curse!" Eddard spat. The wind had shifted, whipping the flames into miniature firestorms, burning even hotter and faster than before.
Toward the grassy slope.
"Let it have the grass!" Eddard shouted, swinging up on his horse. "Downslope, where Coryn saw it leap the rock! With luck we'll be in time!"
Coryn could not remember being so numb with exhaustion, so drained in every muscle and nerve fiber, as when he and Old Timas stumbled into the makeshift camp on the third night of the fire. They had worked without stopping all that night and the next day, cutting new, wider firebreaks, clearing away grass and underbrush.
They saved the resin-trees, only to lose the next two hillsides and part of a nut-tree grove. Coryn saw the fear in the eyes of the smallholders who depended on what their children could gather in the forests to feed their families during the lean seasons. The next few winters would be hard, until

the nut trees which had not been too badly burnt could bear
again. '
Lord Leynier was a generous man. In times of need, the castle would slaughter some of its livestock, the older and weaker animals, to distribute the meat and lessen the demand for feed grain.
Now, toward the end of the third day, a young boy on a pony brought orders from Lord Leynier that the men who'd gone out in the first groups were to rest. A handful of replacements had come from the small estates to the south and east. But they could look for no help from High Kinnally. Lord Lanil Storn had refused both men and Petro's passage to Tramontana.
At the news, a cry of dismay rose from the smallholders. Ash-streaked faces turned paler.
"Vai dom," said one man, "how can they not send help against-against fire?"
Eddard's jaw set tight, and for a moment Coryn saw his father's eyes flash in his brother's face. "I know not if he means to let us waste our strength against the fire and then strike when we are weak, or if he is fool enough to think the fire will stay on our lands only."
Coryn thought of the old proverb, Fire knows no law but its own. Then he remembered that Kieran, the Keeper at Tramontana, was a distant Aillard cousin. The obligations of blood ran strong in the Hellers. "Perhaps," he said in one of those quicksilver leaps of thought which came all too often now, "he fears that the Tower may give us other things besides fire-fighting chemicals."
"You mean weapons?" Eddard looked grim. "If only they would! That is, if there is anything left of us once this fire is done."
Eddard turned toward the waiting horses, but Coryn

remained for a moment with Timas. The old man's eyes watered as if smoke still blew across them.
"It's a rough business," Coryn blurted out, aware of his own awkwardness. Without knowing why, he wanted to say something, to ease the other man's unvoiced distress.
"Aye, lad, that it is." Timas's voice was gravelly from smoke, but Coryn felt the emotional resonances beneath the words. "But fightin' fires isna' like warfare. Then it's the lords that get all the glory and it's us poor folk that pay for it."
"But," Coryn said, repeating words he'd head his father utter, "would you not suffer even more under an unjust ruler? Not every lord takes care of his people as my father does. Storn would let your children starve while he sits in his castle and feasts, or so I've heard. Isn't that worth fighting for?"
Sighing, Timas shook his head. "How little you know of it, lad."
"Eat as much as you can and then sleep," Eddard said as they reined their plodding horses into the makeshift headquarters. The camp lay on flat, rock-strewn ground, set on a hillside that had burned a dozen seasons before, so that only brush and saplings grew. A spring yielded water for cooking and bathing burns.
The women and younger children of the castle had set up picket lines, an outdoor kitchen, and a few tents. Tessa and the next youngest sister, Margarida, moved briskly between the tents, carrying bandages and salves for burns, basins of washing water, and poultices for pulled muscles. In the absence of Lady Leynier, for their mother had died at Kristlin's birth, Tessa assumed the duties of supervising the household staff and dispensing herbal remedies to everyone on the

estate. In her plain dress and kerchief, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow, she issued a stream of orders for the care of the injured. Margarida followed in her wake, a wide-eyed shadow.
Men who had come in earlier, their faces and garments grimed with ashes, hunkered over cups of meat-laced porridge or sprawled exhausted on blankets.
Coryn slipped to the ground and gratefully handed over Dancer's reins to one of the castle people. The smell of the food sent a wave of nausea through his belly. He followed Eddard to the rough table where Lord Leynier sat, poring over maps with his coridom. At his left side, a stranger stood, watching silently. The hood of his dark gray cloak masked his features.