"Katherine Kurtz - Knights Templar 01 - Temple and the Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kurtz Katherine)

The two Templars were among the last of the ship's company to arrive. Gratefully accepting a bowl of
hot broth from one of the maids, and changing his sodden mantle for a dry blanket, Arnault shifted his
attention to the other end of the long, smoky room, where the farmwife and two girls he judged to be her
daughters were clucking anxiously over a small, white-faced form bundled into a bed before the roaring
fire. From their tight-lipped expressions, he inferred that there was little sign of improvement in the Maid's
condition.

Bishop Narve and his canon joined the women a moment later. Arnault was taken aback to see that the
old man had donned a white vestment and stole over his sober clerical array; the canon bore a lighted
candle and several other items. The bishop made the sign of the cross over the child's frail, unconscious
form and laid his hand on her brow as his own head bowed in prayer. From the snatches of Latin that
reached his ears, Arnault realized that the old man was administering the viaticum, the Communion rite
reserved by the Church for those at the point of death.

"If I were a vassal of the house of Canmore," Jay remarked in an undertone, "I would be on my knees in
prayer."

"God may yet vouchsafe a miracle," Arnault murmured.

Sick at heart, he drank down his broth and withdrew to an adjoining room of the house with others of the
company to await further developments. Jay followed, but joined one of the men of the princess's military
escort miserably warming his hands over a brazier of hot coals. Having no desire for his own comfort,
Arnault made his way numbly to the opposite side of the room, where an alcove heaped with sheepskins
suddenly beckoned with an insistence that, after so long without proper rest, would not be denied.

He folded to his knees like a man sinking into quicksand, but he made himself shift to sit with his back
against the wall as his heavy eyelids closed, stubbornly dragging his exhausted mind toward something
approaching a suitable composure for prayer-or would appear to be prayer, or sleep, to anyone
observing him.

Thus blind to his surroundings, he could still feel the wayward motion of the ship, tugging him insistently
toward the sleep his body craved, but he applied long familiar disciplines to turn his focus inward,
drawing a deep breath as he sought the still point at the center of his being and then conjured an image of
the little princess before his mind's eye: not the frail, colorless doll barely breathing before the fire in the
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next room but the solemn, wide-eyed child for whom he had developed a distant fondness while he
waited for her ship to sail from Bergen.

With body and mind now bending to the will of soul, he slowly found himself apparently drifting with
disembodied lightness back to the threshold of the central hearth chamber where the little Maid was
being tended. The sensation of being in two places at once was one he had encountered before, a state
over which he had some control. Conscious of having temporarily left his physical body behind, he willed
his consciousness closer toward the ailing princess. The area surrounding the child's bed was like an
island of light in the midst of softly muted shadows.

He caught his breath slightly as he sensed that the source of the brightness was the little Maid herself-not