"Gordon R. Dickson - Dragon Knight 09 - The Dragon and the F" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

Standing before the six-inch squares of glass that made up the panes in the Solar
window, warmed by the blazing fireplace, refueled even while he and Angie
slept by the servant who, with a man-at-arms, was always on duty outside their
door, Jim felt a chill go through him.

They grew more numerous every day, these drifters. Running from news of the
bubonic plague, now in FranceтАФalways traveling west, always so poor they did
not even have a donkey to carry their belongings, and with no real goal in sightтАФ
driven on only by the instinct for survival. The chill deepened in Jim. There they
trudged, cold, undoubtedly hungry, if not starving. All doors were closed to them
out of a fear of the very sickness they fled from.

No community would take them in, for the same fear. Some member of the
Church might put out food for them, but otherwise could not helpтАФprobably
would not help. They had probably given up hope of aid, even from Heaven.

Faith and Love, those two great Pillars of Strength in the medieval worldтАФ

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Gordon R. Dickson - The Dragon and the Fair Maid of Kent


available to even the poorestтАФwere almost surely lost to them by now. Faith,
that offered hope even beyond the grave, would have been drowned in the
animal effort to live. Love, in all its meanings of this timeтАФlove of wife,
children, comrades, community, and countryтАФall the ways the word wove
together in the tapestry of medieval society, had once made the fabric of their
lives. All gone now.

What was left now was no more than the blind urge to run, and under that
instinct, they trudged mindlessly westward, ever westward, like cattle before the
driving, level snow in the fierce wind of a blizzard.

Jim remembered how he had lied about being a knight and a baron when he and
AngieтАФnow his wifeтАФcame to this medieval world, a far different version of
the Earth into which he had been born and grown up. He stood here now, warm,
protected and fed as what he had claimed to be. It was true he had done what
was required of someone with the rank he had claimed. He had followed the
rules. He had fought with the proper weapons when necessary, according to the
customs hereтАФnot well, but well enough to get by. But his attempts to live had
been rewarded. Those two out there had not. There was no more fairness in this
time and place than there had been in the world of his twentieth-century birth.

The ones he watched might reach the sea eventuallyтАФit was not a great distance
from them nowтАФand there would be nothing for them there, either. What would
they do then? Drown themselves like lemmings in their spring migration? There
seemed no sense or reason to their keeping on.

The chill was deep in him now, and he knew what had driven it there: the
question that had returned again and again to him the last two years of those few