"George R. R. Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire 4 - A Feast for Crows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

uncertain what he was, but instead of the alchemist he'd found Mollander and
Armen and the Sphinx, with Roone in tow. It would have raised suspicions not to
join them.

The Quill and Tankard never closed. For six hundred years it had been
standing on its island in the Honeywine, and never once had its doors been shut
to trade. Though the tall, timbered building leaned toward the south the way
novices sometimes leaned after a tankard. Pate expected that the inn would go
on standing for another six hundred years, selling wine and ale and fearsomely
strong cider to rivermen and seamen, smiths and singers, priests and princes,
and the novices and acolytes of the Citadel.

"Oldtown is not the world,' declared Mollander, too loudly. Me was a knight's
son. and drunk as drunk could be. Since they brought him word of his father's
death upon the Blackwater. he got drunk most every night. Even in Oldtown. far
from the fighting and safe behind its walls, the War of the Five Kings had
touched them all... although Archmaester Benedict insisted that there had never
been a war of five kings, since Renly Baratheon had been slain before Balon
Greyjoy had crowned himself.

"Mv father always said the world was bigger than any lord's castle,"
Mollander went on. "Dragons must be the least of the things a man might find in
Qarth and Asshai and Yi Ti. These sailors' stories . . ."

".. . are stories told by sailors,"' Armen interrupted. "Sailors, my dear
Mollander. Go back down to the docks, and I wager you'll find sailors who'll
tell you of the mermaids that they bedded, or how they spent a year in the
belly of a fish."

"How do you know they didn't?" Mollander thumped through the grass, looking
for more apples. "You'd need to be down the belly yourself to swear they
weren't. One sailor with a story, aye. a man might laugh at that, but when
oarsmen off four different ships tell the same tale in four different
tongues..."

'The tales are not the same." insisted Armen. "Dragons in Asshai.



A FEAST FOR CROWS



s



dragons in Qarth. dragons in Meereen, Dothraki dragons, dragons freeing slaves
. . . each telling differs from the last."