"Gordon R. Dickson - Dragon Knight 02 - The Dragon Knight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

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Chapter One

It was a frosty March morning just at daybreak in the Malencontri woods, which with a name like that
should have been somewhere in France or Italy, but were actually in England.

Not that anyone who had anything to do with those woods- from the three hedgehogs curled up together
for warmth in their untidy, leaf-filled hollow under a nearby hedge, to Sir James Eckert, Baron de Bois de
Malencontri et Riveroak, asleep with his wife, the Lady Angela, in the castle nearby- never bothered to
use that frenchified name in ordinary conversation, mind you. The title of Malencontri had been pinned on
the woods by their previous owner, who was now a landless fugitive, possibly somewhere on the
continent; and serve him right.

With Sir Hugh de Malencontri safely out of the way, all the local inhabitants had gone back to referring
to the woods by their real name, which was that of Highbramble Forest. All of which was a matter of
supreme indifference to the one individual on his feet at the moment and passing through them, not far
from the aroused but-happily-safely hidden hedgehogs and close enough to the Castle Malencontri to see
it clearly between the trees.

It was a natural indifference, since the early traveler was Aargh, an English wolf, who regarded not only
this woods, but a number of others as well, as his own personal territory anyway, and so never bothered
to concern himself about what others might call it.

Actually, Aargh very seldom bothered to concern himself about anything. For example, although the
early spring morning was bitterly chill, he paid no attention to that fact, except insofar as it increased the
possibility of scent trails lying closer than usual to the ground. He showed, in fact, the same sort of
unconcern toward the temperature that he did to all other things-wind, rain, brambles, humans, dragons,
sandmirks, ogres, and all else. He would have shown it in equal degree to earthquakes, volcanoes, and
tidal waves, if he had happened to encounter them, but so far he had not. He was a descendant of dire
wolves, as large as a small pony, and his philosophy was that the day anything came along that he could
not handle he would be dead, which would take care of any problems that might arise, in either case.

He did pause now, to glance briefly at the castle and at the square box of its solar chamber, with the
newfangled glass panes in the arrow slits that were its windows just now beginning to reflect the first light
of the dawn sky. But in spite of the strong opinions he had against glassed-in windows, he had a personal
fondness for Sir James and Lady Angela, whom he knew to be aslumber right now in the solar,
slugabeds though the two were to be wasting a fine crisp dawn like the present one by spending it
indoors.

The fondness was one that went back to the time he and Sir James (with some others, admittedly) had
been involved in a certain small altercation with an ogre and some other, similarly unwholesome,
creatures at the Loathly Tower out on the meres. Sir James had then, through no fault of his own, been
inhabiting the body of a friend of AarghтАЩs-a dragon named Gorbash. Aargh allowed himself a few
moments of nostalgic recollection of those past, but interesting, times.