"Roberta Gellis - Fires of Winter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gellis Roberta)

mother to leave the keep, or if she would not, to give me to one of the serf families in
the outer bailey. I would not have grieved much about being parted from my mother.
By the time I could conceive that there were other places to live, most of her hopes
had soured. She was plying her trade again, and I was a nuisance. She kept me clean
and fed but preferred my absence to my presence. In any case, although I did not
know it then, she had not the power to be rid of me. My father would not
acknowledge meтАФbut he would not let me go either. The lady of the keep had lost
two more babes over those three or four years, and little as Sir William Fermain liked
a whore's child, I was a living son.
Moreover, as the years passed, I came to look more and more like a Fermain. I
could not have displayed the aquiline nose or the square, stubborn chin of the
Fermains in those early years, but my skin was already darker than that of the local
people, my hair so dark a brown as to be safely called black, and my eyes the same.
I had grown happier also because my father had ceased to torment meтАФnot that I
ever grew to feel anything for him other than fear and angry resentment. The reason I
became less a target for his cruelty was that from the first time an old man-at-arms
put a blunt wooden sword into my hand, I knew, as if by instinct, how to handle it. It
was the same with horses. I was running among their feet out of love for them as
soon as I was steady on my own, and riding was my greatest pleasure from the
moment I was set astride.
Had my father ignored me completely, I would have been perfectly happy, but as
my skills in horsemanship and swordsmanship increased, he watched me often with
an expression that made me uneasy, and he brought others to look at me. One man I
recall in particular, then only because he looked so much like my father that I was
doubly afraid, but since then for many reasons.
I was six years old at that time. I remember clearly because one day my mother
gave me a small round metal helmet and a leather jerkin sewn all over with metal
scales. She told me my age then and that the helm and hauberk were gifts from my
father. She smiled at me and kissed me tooтАФa thing I could not remember her ever
doingтАФand said I would make her a great lady yet. She was then suckling another
boy child, one whose father she could not name, but she let him scream on the heap
of straw where he lay while she dressed me in my father's gift.
Many years later I realized that the gift and the new attention he was paying me
made my mother think he intended to recognize me soon. The lady of the keep was
great with child again, and my mother believed that when that babe died, my father
would give up hope and make me his heir. Poor woman, her hopes were never to be
realized because my father's wife at last bore a babeтАФa daughterтАФwho clung to life.
I saw Audris, who had been baptized in haste, since she was not expected to live,
only a few hours after she was born. She was a tiny, scrawny creature, but strangely
beautiful, brought to my mother to nurse because my father's lady wife was dying.
The memory of how she lookedтАФof all the sights and sounds of that nightтАФare
very vivid because I was so frightened at first.
It was late at night and I was wakened by the men with torches who accompanied
the woman carrying the whimpering babe. Being wakened would not have impressed
me; it was no unusual thing because of my mother's trade, but the crowd of finely
dressed people and their loud, excited voices as they discussed the lady's coming
death branded each detail on my mind. Young as I was, it was all too clear that they
were glad of the poor lady's perilous condition. I had never even seen her close, yet
that grieved me. Now I know that it was no dislike of the lady herself that bred such
callousness. What they desired was that my father be free to wed a different woman,