"Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 2 - Witches of Wenshar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

some woman's raucous whoop riding up over them like a descant.
Beside the bar one of the brown-faced shirdar warriors pushed back
his head veils and raised his cup as the noise subsided a little. "And
drink also to her lord and husband to be, Incarsyn of Hasdrozaboth,
Lord of the Dunes!" Under the veils, black hair, long and thick as a
woman's and braided against the dust, framed a hawk-thin face that
was handsome, proud, and very young.
The three warriors with him-all young men and none of them
over twenty, Starhawk thought-put aside their veils and lifted their
cups. Their piercing cry rang against the sudden silence of the room like
the discordant clatter of a dropped tray.
The silence in the room was so complete Starhawk could hear the
jingle of bridle bits from the horses tied outside. The young man looked
around him, his face scarlet with fury and shame. A few feet away at
the bar, the tough little black man leaned against the railing, his brown
eyes hard with derisive challenge.
Furious, the young man drank off his cup and hurled it at the wall
behind the bar. The barkeep ducked aside-the cup itself, harder-fired
than the adobe brick, did not even shatter. Silently, the four young
shirdar stalked from the room, their white cloaks swirling against the
jambs of the open doors as they vanished into the dusk outside.
"Norbas, one of these days you're going to buy yourself a shiv
between the ribs," sighed a voice, deep and half-drunken, from the next
table. The black man, stepping away from the bar, whirled in surprise.
Then his scarred face broke into a blazing white grin as he saw the big
man sitting there.
 "What the hell are you doing here, Osgard?" He crowded his way
over, followed by two or three others, wearing like him the clothes of
wealthy townsmen: boned doublets and stiffened linen collars of gaudier
hues than were considered good taste north of the mountains, breeches
and boots rather than the more sophisticated long hose. The man at the
next table was dressed the same way, though with the slight untidiness
that spoke, like his slurring voice, of someone who had been drinking
since just past noon.
"Can't a man slip out for a drink now and then?" Like Sun Wolf,
the man Osgard was big, a thumb-breadth shorter than the Wolf's six
feet, fairer than the Wolf and going gray. Like the others, under the
richness of his clothes, his body was the body of a man who has both
worked and fought. In his broad, unshaven face his green eyes glinted
with annoyance. "Maybe I knew I'd meet you here. The match has
been made, Norbas, like others before it. I tell you, let it be."
Norbas sniffed scornfully and stiff-armed a pottery cup brimming
with the murderous white liquid known locally as Panther Sweat. "I
never trusted those sneaky heathens and I never will," he stated flatly. "I
bought the round to drink to Tazey's happiness, not to that of some
barbarian she has to marry."
"You have a right to think as you please, but you'll come to grief
carrying on about it in bars," the man Osgard said a little grimly. "It's for
the good of the land; I've told you that before ... " And like the wash of
a sea wave, the noise of other conversations covered theirs.