"03 - King and Emperor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

"Aren't you supposed to be looking after that priestess-female?" inquired Cwicca.
Skaldfinn scowled. "Don't call her that. She just says she is. She hasn't been accepted."
Brand looked round as if surprised to note that Svandis was not present. "I suppose so," he muttered. "She makes me feel cold just looking at her. Daughter of the Boneless One! I knew she existed all right, there was a good deal of talk about it. I just hoped the whole Hel-spawn family was dead."
"But you are supposed to be looking after her," pressed on Cwicca. He and Hund, born and bred within twenty miles of each other, had a strong fellow-feeling. If Hund and his master Shef accepted the woman, the rules and rituals of the Way would not count for much with him.
"She's safe enough," said Osmod. "Find her own way back, I dare say." He too waved his mug at their smiling hosts for a refill. "In some towns, I know, woman wanders off, she'll end up raped in an alley with a sack over her head. Not here! Chop your hand off as soon as look at you, and other bits too. And the Cadi's men everywhere."
"Cursed noisy woman," grumbled Brand. "Not sure six drunken sailors isn't what she needs."
Skaldfinn retrieved Brand's mug and tipped half the contents of it into his own. "I don't like the woman," he said, "but you're wrong there. Six drunken sailors isn't a tenth of what she's met already. And it hasn't done her any good at all.
"But she'll make her own way back to our quarters right enough," he added pacifically. "She's got no choice. Doesn't speak a word of the language. Any language they speak here." He turned and called out to their hosts in the bastard Latin, studded with Arab words, which he had already recognized as their native dialect.
In a cool courtyard not far from the hot shut-in room where the men were sitting, Svandis sat on a bench eying the circle of women who sat with her, round the fountain. Slowly she put a hand up to her veil, pulled it away from her face, threw back her hood. Her copper hair spilled down, framing the pale ice-water eyes. Some of the women around her drew in deep breaths. Others did not.
"You speak English, then," said one of them. She too dropped her veil, as the others did. Svandis looked at the one who had spoken: realized she was almost as fair as herself, with hair the color of pale ash-wood and green eyes. Realized too that she was a woman of amazing beauty. Since she had grown past childhood Svandis had been used to being the center of all eyes. If this woman were in the room, she admitted to herself, that might not be so.
"Yes," she replied, in English also. "But not well. I am a Dane."
The women looked at each other. "Danes took many of us from our homes," said the first one. "Sold us to the harems of the powerful. Some of us did wellЧthose who knew how to use their bodies. Others not so well. We have no reason to love Danes." As she spoke there was a continual patter of translation from English into Arabic. Svandis realized that those around her were of mixed race and language. All, though, young and beautiful.
"I know," she said. "My father was Ivar Ragnarsson."
This time the expressions moved from fear to rage. Hands moved inside the all-covering cloaks. The ash-blonde girl thoughtfully pulled a long steel needle from her hair.
"I know what my father was. I know what he did. It happened to me tooЧand worse to my mother."
"How could such a thing happen to you? A princess of the Danes? Of the Viking woman-stealers?"
"I will tell you. But let me make it a condition." Svandis looked round the circle of a dozen women, trying to estimate their age and race. Half of them Northerners, she could see, but some olive-skinned like the men of Cordova, one almost yellow-skinned, othersЧshe could not tell. "The condition is that each of us shall tell the others what is the worst thing that has happened to her. Then we will all know we are on the same side. Not English, or Danes, or Arabs. All women."
The women looked sidelong at each other as the translation pattered out. "And I will begin. And I will tell you not of the day I lost my virginity for a crust of stale bread. Not of the day I buried all my friends at once, in one grave. No, I will tell you of the day my mother died..."
By the time the last woman had finished speaking, the sun had moved off the central courtyard and the shadows were lengthening. The ash-blonde girl wiped the tears from her face, not for the first time, and waved imperiously at the cloisters round the fountain. Silently slave-bodyguards appeared, setting out small tables with dishes of fruit, jars of cool water and sherbet, faded back into the shadows to watch their masters' property.
"Very well," she said. "So we are all the same. Even if you are a Dane and the daughter of a madman. But now, tell us what we want to know. What brought you here? Who is the one-eyed king? Are you his woman? And why do you wear the strange robes, like the priests they talk about? Have they made you a priestess, and of which God?"
"There is something I have to tell you first," said Svandis, her voice dropping even though she was sure none of the men in the shadows could understand her tongue.
"There is no God. Not even Allah."
For the first time the mutter of translation ceased. The women looked at each other, unsure how to put what she had said into other words. So close to the shahada: there is no God but God. So far apart. And if saying the shahada made man or woman irrevocably a Muslim, saying its oppositeЧthat must mean death at the least.
"Let me explain."

Chapter Eight
What do you mean, you don't know where the NithhЎgg-gnawed woman is? I told you not to let her out of your sight!"
Brand, never used to being spoken to in this way since the day his beard had first begun to grow, clenched his massive fists and started to rumble a reply. By his side, almost two feet shorter, stood Hund, his face anxious both at the disappearance of Svandis and at the growing confrontation between a guilty but unapologetic Brand and an angry, overburdened Shef.
All round them turmoil reigned. The Northerners had been assigned a whole courtyard, a kind of barracks by the banks of the Guadalquivir. Now men ran in and out of every door, the air was filled with shouts of rage and inquiry. Gear accumulated on the sanded courtyard floor, with men standing guard over it against comrades who might be inclined to remedy their deficiencies at the expense of someone more careless. Viking skippers and English captains of crossbow platoons counted their men and tried to work out who was missing.
"Look at the goats'-turd mess," Shef shouted on. "Twelve men missing, Skarthi says some bastard's sold half the oars for his shipЧthe oars, for Christ's sake, I mean Thor's sakeЧand the towel-heads screaming at me all the time to get moving, get back down river, the Christians are coming with a fleet and an army and Loki knows what. We'll get back to the ships and find they've already been burnt to the waterline without throwing a rock because everyone's asleep. And now I have to stop and look for some useless woman because you couldn't keep your hands off the beer-bottle!"
Brand's rumble turned into a growl, he thrust both hands firmly into his belt in an attempt to keep from strangling his king, lord and former crew-carl, Hund ludicrously stepped between the two much bigger men in an attempt to hold them back: Shef realized that the grinning faces watching the confrontation were now looking over his shoulder. He turned.
Through the gates of the courtyard, still in the early morning shadow, stepped Svandis. Her veil was still discreetly pulled across her face. As she met fifty hostile stares, set in a growing silence, she stripped the veil back. The pale ice-water eyes glared out over a set jaw. Brand clutched his belly instinctively, with a low moan.
"Well, she's back," said Hund soothingly.
"Yes, but where has she been?"
"Out tomcatting," muttered Brand. "Out all night. Probably some Arab picked her up for his harem and then realized she wasn't worth the trouble. Don't blame him."
Shef considered the angry face in front of him, looked sideways at Hund. In his culture every woman was the property of some man, husband, master, father, brother. For one to stray sexually was above all a matter of disgrace for the man. In this case, as far as he could see, if Svandis had an owner it was the man who had taken her as apprentice, Hund. If he seemed unaffected, or undisgraced, then no harm was done. In any case, Shef reflected, he had a strong feeling that Svandis had not seized an unwatched moment to find herself a new lover, whatever Brand thought. She seemed far more angry than flirtatious, for all her beauty. From what Hund had told him, or hinted to him, that was only natural.
Svandis braced herself for a torrent of abuse, and probably blows, the normal consequence of what she had done. Instead Shef started to turn away, turned back and remarked, "Well, as long as you're safe," seized Brand by the arm and began to drag him away towards the pile of stacked oars which Hagbarth was counting once more in an attempt to get a definite answer.
The fury she had been hatching as a protection burst out. "Don't you want to know where I've been?" she shrieked. "What I've been doing?"
Shef looked over his shoulder. "No. Talk to Hund about it. One thing, though. What language were you talking? Skaldfinn was dead sure you wouldn't find an interpreter except for Latin, which you don't know."
"English," Svandis hissed. "How many Englishwomen do you think there are in Cordova? In the harems?"
Shef let go of Brand, walked back to look at her more carefully. Svandis realized that his face had once more turned grim. When he spoke, it seemed to be to himself, though he addressed the words to Hund.
"We might have known, eh? I saw them in Hedeby market, Vikings selling Wendish girls to Arabs. The guard told me the price of girls had gone up since the English trade stopped producing. But they must have been selling girls down here for fifty years. Everywhere we go, Hund, we find them. In backwoods Norway, in turf huts on Shetland, here in Spain. There doesn't seem to be a place in the world without its slave from Norfolk or Lincoln. Or Yorkshire," he added, remembering the berserk Cuthred. "One day we must have a chat with an experienced slaver, I bet we have a few lying quiet in the ranks. Find out how they used to divide them up, price them for the market. Worn-out ones for the Swedish sacrifice, strong workers for the hill-farms. And the pretty ones down here, for gold not silver."
Shef's hands seemed to grope for a weapon, but as usual he was not carrying one, not even a sword at his belt.
"All right, Svandis, tell me about it sometime. I don't blame you for what your father did, and he's paid his price. Now, as you can see, we're moving. Get some breakfast, get your things together. Hund, see if we have any sick."
He moved off purposefully towards the oars, shouting for Skaldfinn to see if any could be ransomed from their new owners. Svandis glared uncertainly at his back. Brand too moved away, muttering into his beard. Hund looked up at his apprentice.
"Have you been talking to them about your beliefs?" he said quietly.
"The infidels are playing with their kites again," remarked the master of the Cordovan flagship to the captain of marines.
The captain, a Cordovan, spat neatly into the sea to show disgust and contempt. "They are trying to catch up with the learned man, bin-Firnas, Allah be merciful to him. As if the sons of dogs from the far end of Barbary could match the deeds of a true philosopher! See, their kite sinks already, and it has no man or boy in it. It is going down like an old sheik's penis. A far cry from bin-Firnas, I saw his kite fly like a bird with a stout boy in its beak. I wish the infidels may perish in torment, for their pride and their folly."
The master looked sideways at the captain, wondering if such fury was wise. "The curse of Allah on them," he said placatingly. "And on all deniers of the Prophet. But may it not fall on these ones till we have seen them use their stone-machines."
"Stone machines!" snarled the captain. "Better to meet the worshipers of Yeshua saber in hand, as we have always done before, and always defeated them."