"Barbara Hambly - Darwath 4 - Mother Of Winter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Graw swung around angrily, a brick-faced man with the fair hair not often seen in the
lands once called the Realm of Darwath, perhaps five years older than Rudy's thirty
years. Janus of Weg, commander of the elite corps of the Keep Guards, hid a smile-
he'd lost warriors twice due to the inefficiency of Graw's farmer militia-and the Lady
Minalde, last High Queen of Darwath and Lady of the Keep, raised a hand for silence.
"Rudy." Her low, sweet voice was pleasantly neutral in greeting, as if he had not
spoken. "Master Graw rode up from the Settlements with the tribute sheep today, to
hear from your own lips why there hasn't been further progress in eliminating slunch
from the fields."
Rudy said, "What?" In three years, slunch in the fields and in huge areas of meadow
and woods, both here in Renweth Vale and down by the River Settlements-had
become an endemic nuisance, indestructible by any means he or Ingold or anyone else
had yet been able to contrive.
It would burn after a fashion but grew back within days, even if the dirt it had grown
upon were sown with salt, soaked with oil of vitriol at any strength Ingold could
contrive, or dug out and heaped elsewhere, the slunch grew back both in the dirt heap
and in the hole. It simply ignored magic. It grew. And it spread, sometimes slowly,
sometimes with alarming speed.
"How about asking me something simple, like why don't we get rid of rats in the
Keep? Or ragweed pollen in the spring?"
"Don't you get smart with me, boy," Graw snapped in his flat, deaf man's voice. "You
think because you sit around reading books and nobody makes you do a hand's turn of
work you can give back answers to a man of the land, but..."
Rudy opened his mouth to retort that until the rising of the Dark, Graw had been a
man of the paint-mixing pots in Gae-his wife and sons did most of the work on his
acres down in the River Settlements, by all accounts, as they'd done here in the Vale
before the nine hundred or so colonists had moved down to the river valleys to found
settlements three years ago.
But Alde said, still in resolutely friendly, uninflected tones, "I think what Rudy is
trying to say is that there are some problems, not amenable to any remedy we know,
which have been with us for thousands of years, and that slunch may turn out to be
one of them." The glass-thin breeze from the higher mountain peaks stirred tendrils of
her long black hair, fluttering the new leaves of the aspen and mountain laurel that
rimmed the woods, a hundred yards from the Keep on its little mound. "We don't
know."
"The stuff's only been around for three years," pointed out Rudy, upon whose toe
Alde had inconspicuously trodden.
"And in those three years," Graw retorted, "it's cut into fields we've sweated and bled
to plant, it's killed the wheat and the trees on which our lives and the lives of our
children depend." One heavy arm swept toward the farms downslope from the Keep,
the fields with their lines of withe separating one plot holder's land from the next.
Like puruIent sores, white spots of slunch blotched the green of young wheat in three
or four places, the wrinkled white fungus surrounded by broad rings of brown where
the grain was dying.
Graw's mouth clamped into a settled line, and his pale tan eyes, like cheap beads,
sliced resentfully between the slim black-haired woman beside him, the young wizard
in his painted vest, and the heavy-shouldered, black-clothed shape of the Commander
of the Guards, as if he suspected them of somehow colluding to withhold from him
the secret of comfort and survival.
"It's sickening the crops, and if the River Settlements are sending wheat and milk and