"Brian Daley - Doomfarers of Coramonde" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daley Brian)

rounded holes; one had such an opening fairly between his eyes and a huge and hideous gap torn in
the back side of his skull. An eldritch smell, unlike anything the Prince had ever scented before,
hung in the air.
He decided to continue on to the castle, wondering if the lancers had been sent to find him or to
interfere with the school that Andre deCourteney had set up. He knew that word of his escape could
have outraced him via dispatch riders on the Tangent, if those hi Earthfast knew where to look.
He passed through the town without seeing anyone who might have given him information, but on the
track leading up to the little castle he came up to an elderly couple urging a recalcitrant donkey
to pull a cart loaded with their personal possessions, bedding and household goods of questionable
value. The donkey remained stubbornly seated.
The old man, seeing him, snatched a short bow from the cart and fumbled for an arrow. Springbuck
laid a hand to Bar and said, "I carry no quarrel to you, yet do not nock that shaft or you force
me to show you my sword. What's come to pass in Erub?"
The old man was a shrunken specimen without an
38
THE DOOMFARERS OF CORAMONDE
excess ounce of flesh on life-weary bones. He laid aside his bow after a moment and removed his
shapeless hat from years of habit in talking to a mounted warrior, but there was a spirited glint
in his eye.
He swallowed once, and admitted, "This noon a de--tachment of lancers came to make arrest of our
teachers, Andre deCourteney and Van Duyn. We didn't want their new teaching to end, and so there
was fighting. But now more soldiers are coming and we must go. The only safety lies in the keep
with Van Duyn and deCourteney."
"What?" exploded the Prince, baffled. "Are you so enamored of these teachings that you'll leave
your homes and defy the regulars?"
The toothless mouth became, for a moment, firm and set. The grizzled chin came up, and the man's
reply was slow and emphatic.
"I have lived my whole life within a day's walk of this town," he began. "I've worked hard every
day that I can remember for my overlord. I go forth in the darkness each morning to follow his
oxen in the furrows, my lot scarcely better than theirs. I have watched my wife grow old and
crooked with endless toil, she who was once so fair and gay. Two sons have I lost to plague, two
to war, one daughter to famine and another at her birth. There is small enough difference between
me and the beasts in harness, so constant is my labor and so seldom have I given any thought to my
own life and its meaning. I just tendered my tithes and worried about the crop.
"Then there came two who made me pause and wonder about the wherefores of life, who told me about
the world beyond my furrows. They quoted the words of learned men, glorious thinkers and doers of
whom we had never heard, and when they asked what we thought of this and I spoke, they listened.


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AH this, though I am only an old man, stooped with the years.
"And it was as if I had been shut up in darkness all my life and only now let out. So now, the
Queen at Earthfast has decided to put an end to the practice of teaching here, to make of us again
what we were. But when the cavalrymen came we fought them. Fought
Of Deaths, Of Departure
39
them! Few of them left alive, and Van Duyn brought down many with his weapon that reaches out to
kill at distances.