"07 - The Bellmaker UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jacques Brian)

Those were the dangerous seasons. Battered across dark, roaring seas they went, narrowly dodging huge floating ice mountains, the ships' sails and riggings frozen

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stiff with rimy spray. Sometimes they lay becalmed in ghostly latitudes, wreathed in spectral mists with the waters beneath them still and fathomless. Completely lost, the Foxwolf plowed onward, driven across trackless wastes where no vessel's bow had ever cut spray, avoiding leviathans of the deep and shoals of unnamed sea-beasts. Strange, hostile waters closed over their wake as the weary convoy sailed deeper into the unknown.

Then one morning the lookouts saw that the seas were gentler. Small fish swam playfully alongside the wave-scoured hulls, and the weather turned fair. Gazing upward, the eyes of Foxwolf beheld fleecy white clouds with sun peeping between them. Looking out to the horizon, he saw the thin green-brown line of land. The Foxwolf threw back his head and howled triumphantly.

He had defeated the wide, wintry seas. Silvamord joined him on deck, and together they bayed their defiance at the blue spring sky. Roaring and screeching, the gray rat horde thronged decks and rigging to cheer their leaders. It was a curious sight: three big, battered ships, swarming with thin, wild-eyed creatures, tattered sails flapping above creaking decks as they rode the ingoing swell toward shore. And so it was that Urgan Nagru came to the far south!

The land lay like a dream out of time under the spell of early spring. Southsward! A soft, peaceful region of plenty that had never felt the cruel breath of war. Stowing the three ships up a heavily wooded creek, Nagru waded ashore with Silvamord and their ragged, murderous followers. Lean from hunger and privation, eager for loot and conquest, they pressed hurriedly inland. The time of the Foxwolf had come to Southsward!

The BeUmaker

From his vantage point on a wooded hilltop, Rab Stream-battle gazed across the valley to Castle Floret. The otter had watched and planned almost every day as spring passed into summer. Castle Floret stood atop a high flat plateau, its north side abutting the sheer cliff face. The castle's other three sides were surrounded by a crescent-shaped moat. A mighty drawbridge commanded almost a third of the front south side, and at this edge the plateau had a long flight of broad steps carved into the living rock from top to valley floor.

Rab stared sadly at his old home. It resembled a beautiful forgotten cake left standing on the green-clothed tableland. Against a sky of dusty blue, cream-colored towers shimmered beneath quaint, circular red-tiled roof-caps. Dark green ivy and golden saxifrage flourished amid the crenellations. Campion and climbing roses burgeoned carelessly over windowsills and framed doors. The hot afternoon did not contribute the slightest breeze to ruffle the variegated pennants draped idly around tall flagpoles.

Rab dismissed the dreamlike qualities of his old home, riveting his worried brown eyes on the window alongside the drawbridge top. Had something gone wrong? Did Nagru know of the escape that had been planned? His friends, Gael Squirrelking, Queen Serena, and little Truf-fen, had they received the message from Relph the blackbird? The otter clutched his bow tightly, staring at the window, awaiting the signal as thoughts raced through his troubled mind.

Why, oh why, had Gael not listened to him? Rab recalled the day he had first argued with his friend. The quarrel had become furious and bitter and had ended with

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BRIAN JACQUES

Gael ordering his old friend either to curb his tongue or leave the castle. Stone-faced, Rab stalked angrily out of Floret, taking the entire otter castle guard with himЧnot because he feared Nagru, but because he could see the evil that Gael was blind to.

Rab hated and loathed the cunning Foxwolf with an intensity that banished all fear. Now his friend the Squir-relking and his family were prisoners in their own home. The wickedness of Nagru was a specter that would soon blight the whole of Southsward. Gael should have heeded the warnings Rab had issued, but instead he chose to play the king and offer the Foxwolf hospitality.

Suddenly, Rab's eye caught a flutter of iridescent blue-black wings carrying a scrap of red cloth to the window by the drawbridge.

Rab Streambattle notched an arrow to his bowstring.

The escape was on!

The sun hung like a hot merciless eye, watching two small creatures huddled in the shade of a shale outcrop on die wasteland floor. The mousemaid Mariel of Redwall shook an empty flask over the outstretched tongue of her friend Dandin. Two single drops fell slowly, then no more.

"Put your tongue away," she said, sadly. "The sun will think we're mocking him."

The young mouse nodded skyward as he withdrew his parched tongue. "Huh, he's been mocking us for the last week."

They both sat staring at the empty flask. Mariel gently kicked her slack haversack. "Two stale oatcakes in there. D'you fancy one?"

Dandin smiled ruefully. "No thanks. They're the two

The BeUmaker

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