"Daley, Brian - Coramonde 01 - The Doomfarers of Coramande UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daley Brian)

Determined to take his own gray favorite now that fate had given him the chance, he took the heavy, overgilt saddle from Fireheel and hid it, too, among the pines. He gave brief thought to taking along Eliatim's bow and quiver, but since his poor vision rendered him an inferior archer, he decided to forego the trouble.
He then transferred the reconnaissance saddle to the powerful, long-legged Fireheel, blew out the little lantern and hurled it in the general direction of its owner. Picking up his dampened cloak and resuming it with a slight shiver, he mounted and took the reins of the riderless horse in his right hand. His way lit by occasional bolts from above, he trotted off eastward.
Thoughts buzzed around each other, vying for his attention. He knew that he'd been lucky in his duel with his late instructor. Still, he perceived that there was more substance to the encounter than that. He'd thought for himself, taken a gamble when the situation demanded, won on the resources of eye and hand and brain alone. It was possible, he thought, that he'd been undersold to himself all along.
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Eliatim's other words came back to him, particularly those that made reference to his mother. Had Bey, as Eliatim had implied, caused the death of that Lady, to clear the path for Fania?
The Tangent, raised above the surrounding ground and gently pitched to either side, drained itself of water quickly as the rain abated. Some traffic moved there already: farmers on foot or with carts bringing goods to market, a troop of traveling players bearing torches, forming a swirl of color and motion and song, an officious dispatch rider hastening past them all, various merchants.
Springbuck, relieved at the lack of troops on the Tangent, was the only one bound eastward and so, the way being wide, went quickly. The solution to the problem of his extra horse came to him at dawn, when he encountered a band of tinkers camped at the roadside.
Rather than being bound toward Kee-Amaine, they were about to swing southward. There was brief haggling, and the Prince rode on with a considerable sum of money and some provisions, comfortably sure that the roncm's brands and cropping would be promptly obliterated.
He loosened his cloak as the sun warmed him. Elation over his victory against Eliatim swept into him again. He reappraised himself in light of his own simple and profound decision to stand and fight. He was exhilarated but steady, confident but unimpulsive,
Fireheel happily increased their distance eastward, and a new Springbuck rode into the day, of a far different mettle than he with whom Fania's forces had been so sure they could cope.
It was two days later, and well along in the afternoon, when he reined in magnificent Fireheel on the summit of a low hill to gaze upon Erub.
Ms hunger had been growing for hours, his provisions gone since breakfast. He would have preferred to spend his nights in some inn or tavern on the way, if only to sleep on a bench by the hearth, but had avoided the Tangent since that first dawn for fear of apprehension skirting the odd farm or crofter's hut he'd spied.
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Seeing the end of the narrow, rutted road was good compensation for this, though. The little town was in a valley spread below, and on a rise beyond stood an undersized castle of antiquated design. He knew from his own research at Earthfast that the castle was unten-anted.
A silence hung over Erub as he rode past the crude daub-and-wattle hut that was its outermost limit. He saw no one living, but came upon the dead and all-but-dead in numbers. There were villagers scattered here and there, war arrows in them or the bitter, evident tales of sword and lance wounds.
He rode with hand close to hilt and, coming closer to the square at the center of town, encountered a remarkable thing: soldiers of Coramonde, light cavalrymen, lay slain near an improvised barricade. Of these, many bore injuries from scythe or pitchfork or were pierced with hunting shafts. Many others, though, had odd wounds through their vests of ring mail, small, 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
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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. 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
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them! Few of them left alive, and Van Duyn brought down many with his weapon that reaches out to kill at distances.
"Do we love this new learning, you ask? Well enough, I say, to leave this fief forever if we must, rather than submit again to our overlord."
Springbuck was silent, calculating what their hard life had cost these old souls. Their children gone, life must now be spent in constant labor, since the sons and daughters who would have cared for them in the winter of their days would never return. It was, perhaps, the end of the man's name forever when he died, with no one to keep his memory alive or light incense for him at the altar of his gods.
In this light, the war that Springbuck had contemplated against Fania and Strongblade was not so brave or glittering a thing to entertain.
While he'd been angry at such disrespect shown for a liege, he was fascinated with what energies had been evoked in this aged breast. The peasants were yanking at the donkey's harness again. And critical choices can be made as quickly and as simply as this: the Prince unsheathed Bar and, leaning down, struck the beast loudly across its rump with the fiat of his blade. It bucked to its feet, kicking the cart behind it, and the couple tugged it into motion once more.
The heir to the Ku-Mor-Mai trailed behind.
The moat outside the castle was long dry and choked with high weeds. One of the double doors beyond the drawbridge had been left ajar, doubtless for such latecomers as they. The gates, like the drawbridge, were of old wood but looked sound. The keep's walls were worn but substantial, though rather low by modern standards.
Springbuck brought up the rear into a courtyard where plants had pushed up insistently through defeated cobblestones. There was much debris in sightЧbroken tools, a useless wagon wheel, forgotten benchesЧand after three nights in the open, he was sourly willing to wager that the roof of the place leaked.
The little courtyard was filled with villagers dashing to and fro. Standing atop a wagon at the center of it all, giving commands to bring them to some semblance of
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order, was the man known as Van Duyn, whom Springbuck recognized from his one previous visit to Earth-fast. He was a tall, lean man with gray-white hair and a dour look about him that had made the Prince wonder if anything ever quite satisfied him. His fac'e was creased with worry, and a strange metal framework secured a circle of glass before each of his eyes. Springbuck had once reflected on a possible connection between this and Yardiff Bey's single ocular, but it was said that Van Duyn's lenses simply helped him see more clearly. A small part of the Prince wondered now if he might be able to acquire such a device for himself.
Springbuck began to understand the discomfort of his father, the Protector Suzerain, at hearing the thoughts of Van Duyn; the man could well bring disaster and chaos to Coramonde. What caused usually docile commoners to respond to him so readily, to jump with a will to his every order and stand by him so staunchly?
"See that you use the barbed arrows first," the out-lander was saying, just as the Prince caught his eye. "Are you a Queen's man, sir?" Van Duyn snapped curtly. "With some new mandamus of arrest?"
Thankful that his war mask hid his features, the son of Surehand responded, "I was unaware of your predicament when. I came to hear your new teachings."
The outlander laughed, scant humor in it. "My 'predicament' grows rapidly worse," he shot back. "Of these good people, one in three sees fit to offer his help. And you? A week ago I would have welcomed you as a new student, but now you'll have to run or fight before you can learn." He seemed to think his own words over for a moment. "Perhaps you'll prize the knowledge more for all of that. What do you say?"