"Sara Douglass - The Troy Game 2 - God's Concubine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

When Saxons came that name was strange,
Their own speech they did prefer,
They called the city huden or hondon
And the name soon became
hondon in the Saxon tongue.
Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Chronicle, 1303, Translated by Sara Douglass


Wessex, England, 1050 Winter of
THE TIMBER HALL WAS HUGE, FULLY EIGHTY FEET end to end and twenty
broad. Doors leading to the outside pierced both of the long walls midway down their
length, allowing people exit to the latrines, or to the kitchens for more food, while
trapdoors in the sixty-foot high-beamed roof allowed the smoke egress when weather
permitted: otherwise the fumes from the four heating pits in the floor drifted about the
hall until they escaped whenever someone opened an outer door. Many of the hall's
upright timbers were painted red and gold in interweaving Celtic designs; the heights
were hung with almost one hundred shields.
Tonight, both painted designs and shields were barely visible. The hall was full of

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 Sarah Douglass - God's Concubin


smoke, heat, and raucous, good-humored noise. Men and women, warriors and monks,
earls, thegns, wives, and maidens sat at the trestle tables, which ran the length of the hall,
while thralls, children, and dogs scampered about, either serving wine, cider, or ale, or
nosing out the scraps of meat that had fallen to the rush-covered floor. The wedding feast
had been in progress some three hours. Now most of the boiled and roasted meats had
been consumed, the cheeses were all gone, the sweet-spiced omelettes were little more
than congealed yolky fragments on platters, and the scores of loaves of crusty bread had
been reduced to the odd crumb that further marred the food and alcohol-stained table
linens, and fed the mice, in the rushes, darting among the booted feet of the revelers.
At the head of the hall stood a dais. Before the dais, a juggler sat on a three-legged
stool, so drunk, his occasional attempts to tumble his woolen balls and his sharp-edged
knives achieved little else save to further bloody his fingers.
A group of musicians with bagpipes and flutesтАФstill sober, although they
desperately wished otherwiseтАФstood just to one side of the dais, their music lost
within the shouting and singing of the revelers, the thumping of tables by those
demanding their wine cups be refilled without delay, and the shrieks and barks of children
and dogs writhing hither and thither under the tables and between the legs of the feasters.
In contrast to the wild enthusiasm of the hundreds of guests within the body of the hall,
most of the fifteen or so people who sat at the table on the dais were noticeably restrained.
At the center of the table sat a man of some forty or forty-one years, although his long,
almost white-blond hair, his scraggly graying beard, his thin, ascetic face and the almost
perpetually down-turned corners of his tight mouth made him appear much older. He
wore a long, richly textured red and blue heavy linen tunic, embroidered about its neck,
sleeves and hem with silken threads and semiprecious stones and girdled with gold and
silver. His right hand, idly toying with his golden and jeweled wine cup, was broad and
strong, the hand of a swordsman, although his begemmed fingers were soft and pale: it
had been many years since that hand had held anything but a pen or a wine cup.