"Martin,.George.R.R.-.Song.Of.Ice.And.Fire.-.2.-.A.Clash.Of.Kings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

"The wretch is mad, and in pain, and no use to anyone, least of all himself," declared old Ser Harbert, the castellan of Storm's End in those years. "The kindest thing you could do for that one is fill his cup with the milk of the poppy. A painless sleep, and there's an end to it. He'd bless you if he had the wit for it." But Cressen had refused, and in the end he had won. Whether Patchface had gotten any joy of that victory he could not say, not even today, so many years later.
"The shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my lord " the fool sang on, swinging his head and making his bells clang and clatter. Bong dong, ring-a-ling, bong dong.
"Lord," the white raven shrieked. "Lord, lord, lord."
"A fool sings what he will," the maester told his anxious princess. "You must not take his words to heart. On the morrow he may remember another song, and this one will never be heard again." He can sing prettily in four tongues, Lord Steffon had written . . .
Pylos strode through the door. "Maester, pardons."
"You have forgotten the porridge," Cressen said, amused. That was most unlike Pylos.
"Maester, Ser Davos returned last night. They were talking of it in the kitchen. I thought you would want to know at once."
"Davos . . . last night, you say? Where is he?"
"With the king. They have been together most of the night."
There was a time when Lord Stannis would have woken him, no matter the hour, to have him there to give his counsel. "I should have been told," Cressen complained. "I should have been woken." He disentangled his fingers from Shireen's. "Pardons, my lady, but I must speak with your lord father. Pylos, give me your arm. There are too many steps in
this castle, and it seems to me they add a few every night, just to vex me.
Shireen and Patchface followed them out, but the child soon grew restless with the old man's creeping pace and dashed ahead, the fool lurching after her with his cowbells clanging madly.
Castles are not friendly places for the frail, Cressen was reminded as he descended the turnpike stairs of Sea Dragon Tower. Lord Stannis would be found in the Chamber of the Painted Table, atop the Stone Drum, Dragonstone's central keep, so named for the way its ancient walls boomed and rumbled during storms. To reach him they must cross the gallery, pass through the middle and inner walls with their guardian gargoyles and black iron gates, and ascend more steps than Cressen cared to contemplate. Young men climbed steps two at a time; for old men with bad hips, every one was a torment. But Lord Stannis would not think to come to him, so the maester resigned himself to the ordeal. He had Pylos to help him, at the least, and for that he was grateful.
Shuffling along the gallery, they passed before a row of tall arched windows with commanding views of the outer bailey, the curtain wall, and the fishing village beyond. in the yard, archers were firing at practice butts to the call of "Notch, draw, loose." Their arrows made a sound like a flock of birds taking wing. Guardsmen strode the wallwalks, peering between the gargoyles on the host camped without. The morning air was hazy with the smoke of cookfires, as three thousand men sat down to break their fasts beneath the banners of their lords. Past the sprawl of the camp, the anchorage was crowded with ships. No craft that had come within sight of Dragonstone this past half year had been allowed to leave again. Lord Stannis's Fury, a triple-decked war galley of three hundred oars, looked almost small beside some of the big-bellied carracks and cogs that surrounded her.
The guardsmen outside the Stone Drum knew the maesters by sight, and passed them through. "Wait here," Cressen told Pylos, within. "It's best I see him alone."
"It is a long climb, Maester."
Cressen smiled. "You think I have forgotten? I have climbed these steps so often I know each one by name."
Halfway up, he regretted his decision. He had stopped to catch his breath and ease the pain in his hip when he heard the scuff of boots on stone, and came face-to-face with Ser Davos Seaworth, descending.
Davos was a slight man, his low birth written plain upon a common face. A well-worn green cloak, stained by salt and spray and faded from the sun, draped his thin shoulders, over brown doublet and breeches that matched brown eyes and hair. About his neck a pouch of worn leather hung from a thong. His small beard was well peppered with grey, and he
wore a leather glove on his maimed left hand. When he saw Cressen, he checked his descent.
"Ser Davos," the maester said. "When did you return?"
"In the black of morning. My favorite time." It was said that no one had ever handled a ship by night half so well as Davos Shorthand. Before Lord Stannis had knighted him, he had been the most notorious and elusive smuggler in all the Seven Kingdoms.
"And?"
The man shook his head. "It is as you warned him. They will not rise, Maester. Not for him. They do not love him."
No, Cressen thought. Nor will they ever. He is strong, able, just . . . aye, just past the point of wisdom . . . yet it is not enough. It has never been enough. "You spoke to them all?"
"All? No. Only those that would see me. They do not love me either, these highborns. To them I'll always be the Onion Knight." His left hand closed, stubby fingers locking into a fist; Stannis had hacked the ends off at the last joint, all but the thumb. "I broke bread with Gulian Swann and old Penrose, and the Tarths consented to a midnight meeting in a grove. The others-well, Beric Dondarrion is gone missing, some say dead, and Lord Caron is with Renly. Bryce the Orange, of the Rainbow Guard."
"The Rainbow Guard?"
"Renly's made his own Kingsguard," the onetime smuggler explained, "but these seven don't wear white. Each one has his own color. Loras Tyrell's their Lord Commander."
It was just the sort of notion that would appeal to Renly Baratheon; a splendid new order of knighthood, with gorgeous new raiment to proclaim it. Even as a boy, Renly had loved bright colors and rich fabrics, and he had loved his games as well. "Look at me!" he would shout as he ran laughing through the halls of Storm's End. "Look at me, I'm a dragon," or "Look at me, I'm a wizard," or "Look at me, look at me, I'm the rain god."
The bold little boy with wild black hair and laughing eyes was a man grown now, one-and-twenty, and still he played his games. Look at me, I'm a king, Cressen thought sadly. Oh, Renly, Renly, dear sweet child, do you know what you are doing~ And would you care if you did? is there anyone who cares for him but me~ "What reasons did the lords give for their refusals?" he asked Ser Davos.
"Well, as to that, some gave me soft words and some blunt, some made excuses, some promises, some only lied." He shrugged. "In the end words are just wind."
"You could bring him no hope?"
"Only the false sort, and I'd not do that," Davos said. "He had the truth from me."
Maester Cressen remembered the day Davos had been knighted, after the siege of Storm's End. Lord Stannis and a small garrison had held the castle for close to a year, against the great host of the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne. Even the sea was closed against them, watched day and night by Redwyne galleys flying the burgundy banners of the Arbor. Within Storm's End, the horses had long since been eaten, the dogs and cats were gone, and the garrison was down to roots and rats. Then came a night when the moon was new and black clouds hid the stars. Cloaked in that darkness, Davos the smuggler had dared the Redwyne cordon and the rocks of Shipbreaker Bay alike. His little ship had a black hull, black sails, black oars, and a hold crammed with onions and salt fish. Little enough, yet it had kept the garrison alive long enough for Eddard Stark to reach Storm's End and break the siege.
Lord Stannis had rewarded Davos with choice lands on Cape Wrath, a small keep, and a knight's honors . . . but he had also decreed that he lose a joint of each finger on his left hand, to pay for all his years of smuggling. Davos had submitted, on the condition that Stannis wield the knife himself; he would accept no punishment from lesser hands. The lord had used a butcher's cleaver, the better to cut clean and true. Afterward, Davos had chosen the name Seaworth for his new-made house, and he took for his banner a black ship on a pale grey field-with an onion on its sails. The onetime smuggler was fond of saying that Lord Stannis had done him a boon, by giving him four less fingernails to clean and trim.
No, Cressen thought, a man like that would give no false hope, nor soften a hard truth. "Ser Davos, truth can be a bitter draught, even for a man like Lord Stannis. He thinks only of returning to King's Landing in the fullness of his power, to tear down his enemies and claim what is rightfully his. Yet now . . ."
"if he takes this meager host to King's Landing, it will be only to die. He does not have the numbers. I told him as much, but you know his pride." Davos held up his gloved hand. "My fingers will grow back before that man bends to sense."
The old man sighed. "You have done all you could. Now I must add my voice to yours." Wearily, he resumed his climb.
Lord Stannis Baratheon's refuge was a great round room with walls of bare black stone and four tall narrow windows that looked out to the four points of the compass. In the center of the chamber was the great table from which it took its name, a massive slab of carved wood fashioned at the command of Aegon Targaryen in the days before the Con-
quest. The Painted Table was more than fifty feet long, perhaps half that wide at its widest point, but less than four feet across at its narrowest. Aegon's carpenters had shaped it after the land of Westeros, sawing out each bay and peninsula until the table nowhere ran straight. On its surface, darkened by near three hundred years of varnish, were painted the Seven Kingdoms as they had been in Aegon's day; rivers and mountains, castles and cities, lakes and forests.
There was a single chair in the room, carefully positioned in the precise place that Dragonstone occupied off the coast of Westeros, and raised up to give a good view of the tabletop. Seated in the chair was a man in a tight-laced leather jerkin and breeches of roughspun brown wool. When Maester Cressen entered, he glanced up. "I knew you would come, old man, whether I summoned you or no." There was no hint of warmth in his voice; there seldom was.
Stannis Baratheon, Lord of Dragonstone and by the grace of the gods rightful heir to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, was broad of shoulder and sinewy of limb, with a tightness to his face and flesh that spoke of leather cured in the sun until it was as tough as steel. Hard was the word men used when they spoke of Stannis, and hard he was. Though he was not yet five-and-thirty, only a fringe of thin black hair remained on his head, circling behind his ears like the shadow of a crown. His brother, the late King Robert, had grown a beard in his final years. Maester Cressen had never seen it, but they said it was a wild thing, thick and flerce. As if in answer, Stannis kept his own whiskers cropped tight and short. They lay like a blue-black shadow across his square jaw and the bony hollows of his cheeks. His eyes were open wounds beneath his heavy brows, a blue as dark as the sea by night. His mouth would have given despair to even the drollest of fools; it was a mouth made for frowns and scowls and sharply worded commands, all thin pale lips and clenched muscles, a mouth that had forgotten how to smile and had never known how to laugh. Sometimes when the world grew very still and silent of a night, Maester Cressen fancied he could hear Lord Stannis grinding his teeth half a castle away.
"Once you would have woken me," the old man said.
"Once you were young. Now you are old and sick, and need your sleep." Stannis had never learned to soften his speech, to dissemble or flatter; he said what he thought, and those that did not like it could be damned. "I knew you'd learn what Davos had to say soon enough. You always do, don't you?"
"I would be of no help to you if I did not," Cressen said. "I met Davos on the stair."
"And he told all, I suppose? I should have had the man's tongue shortened along with his fingers."
"He would have made you a poor envoy then."
"He made me a poor envoy in any case. The storm lords will not rise for me. It seems they do not like me, and the justice of my cause means nothing to them. The cravenly ones will sit behind their walls waiting to see how the wind rises and who is likely to triumph. The bold ones have already declared for Renly. For R enly! " He spat out the name like poison on his tongue.
"Your brother has been the Lord of Storm's End these past thirteen years. These lords are his sworn bannermen-"
"His, " Stannis broke in, "when by rights they should be mine. I never asked for Dragonstone. I never wanted it. I took it because Robert's enemies were here and he commanded me to root them out. I built his fleet and did his work, dutiful as a younger brother should be to an elder, as Renly should be to me. And what was Robert's thanks? He names me Lord of Dragonstone, and gives Storm's End and its incomes to Renly. Storm's End belonged to House Baratheon for three hundred years; by rights it should have passed to me when Robert took the Iron Throne."