"David Drake - Crown of the Isles 01 - The Fortress of Glass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

haze. Whatever Tenoctris was looking at couldn't be seen by an ordinary person
like Sharina os-Reise.
Sharina grinned: or, for that matter, seen by Princess Sharina of Haft. In
preparation for meeting the ruler of First Atara, she was this afternoon
wearing court robes garments of silk brocade stiffened with embroidery in gold
thread. They were hot and uncomfortable in most circumstances; here on
shipboard they were awkward beyond words. The Shepherd had five oar-banks and
was as big as a warship got, but the deck of her streamlined hull was no wider
than necessary to allow sailors to trim the yards when the vessel was under
sail.
Sometimes Sharina wondered whether she'd feel more at ease in formal garments
if she'd been raised wearing them. Liane bos-Benliman, her brother Garric's
noble fianc├йe, certainly wore hers with calm style. On the other hand, Liane
did everything with style. If Liane hadn't been such a good person and so
obviously in love with Garric, even Sharina might've felt twinges of envy in
thinking about her.
Sharina and Garric had been raised by their father, the innkeeper in the tiny
community of Barca's Hamlet on Haft. No school for the wealthy could've
educated them better in the literature of the Old Kingdom than Reise himself
had, but they'd grown up in simple woolen tunics and had gone barefoot half
the year.
Sharina grinned. She guessed she could learn to wear court robes more easily
than even Liane could learn to wait tables in a common room packed with sheep
drovers and their servants, many of them drunk.
Horns and trumpets were calling, slowing the hundred and more ships of the
royal fleet to a crawl. A little vessel draped with gaudy bunting was coming
out to meet them with a wriggle of oars.
One of the royal triremes, the swift and handy three-banked vessels which were
the backbone of the fighting fleet, had already come alongside the stranger
and passed it as harmless, though that didn't explain why the island's
authorities felt a need to approach Garric-Prince Garric-at sea. No reasonable
official would choose to negotiate on the wobbling deck of a warship, since
even people who weren't seasick would find a conference table in the palace a
better location for spreading documents and consulting ledgers.
"There seem to be five-no, six passengers," Sharina said, peering down at the
deck of the twenty-oared barge bringing the Ataran delegation. She frowned and
added, "And one of them's just a boy."
The island's present ruler called himself King Cervoran, and his ancestors for
hundreds of years had claimed the title "king" also. They'd gotten away with
it because First Atara kept to itself, never making trouble for its neighbors
or for the King of the Isles in Valles... and because for generations the King
of the Isles had ruled little more than the island of Ornifal and eventually
had ruled nothing outside the walls of the royal palace.
That'd changed when the present King of the Isles, Valence III, adopted a
youth named Garric, a descendent of the ancient line of Old Kingdom monarchs,
as his son and heir apparent. It had to change. Unless there were a strong
hand on the kingdom's rudder, the same forces that swept up Garric and his
sister would smash the new kingdom. The second catastrophe would finish what
that of a thousand years before had left.
It was all well to say that every man should live his life without being