"Mercedes Lackey - Dragon Jousters 1 - Joust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

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Joust by Mercedes
Lackey
Chapter One
The hot wind out of the desert withered everything in its
pathтАФincluding anyone so foolish as to be out in the sun at
midday. It carried reddish dust and sand on its wings, and used
both to scour whatever it did not wither.

It did not howl, for it had no need to howl and rage for its
power to be felt. It only needed to be what it was: relentless,
inescapable, implacable, and ceaseless. This was the dry season,
the season when the wind called kamiseen was king. It swept out
of the sea of sand, bearing with it the furnace heat that drove
man and beast into shelter if they were wise, and sucked the
moisture and life out of everything. The earth was baked as hard
as bricks, as hot beneath a bare foot as the inside of an oven.
Add to that the hammer of the sun, which joined with the
kamiseen in a conspiracy to dry up all life; nothing moved
during the kamiseen at midday, not even slaves.

Except serfs, like Vetch. Altan serfs, the spoils of war, who
were less valuable than slaves.

Little Vetch hunched his shoulders against the pitiless glare of
the sun above him, and licked lips gone dry and cracked in the
heat, as dry and cracked as the earth under his feet.

The walls of his master's compound offered some protection
from the wind, but none from the sun. To his left, the back wall
of tan mud brick around Khefti-the-Fat's workshop and house
cast no shade at all on the path upon which he trudged. To his
right, lower walls of the same material surrounded his master's
tala field.

Calling it a "field," however, was something of an
exaggeration. It could not have held more than five hundred tala
plants, a single green oasis in the sand and baked earth, all of
them heavy with unripe berries. It was here, only a few steps
from the village where Khefti had his workshop, for two reasons.
The first was that tala had to be irrigated during the dry season
if it was to bear any amount of fruit at all. The second was that
Khefti would never have let anything as valuable as a tala plant