"George R. R. Martin - Ice and Fire 4 - Arms of the Kraken" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

the saddle


The sound came softly, the scream of a rusted hinge. "Urri," he muttered, and woke, fearful. There is no hinge here, no door,
no Urri. A flying axe took off half of Urri's hand when he was ten-and-four, playing at the finger dance whilst his father and his
elder brothers were away at war. Lord Quellon's third wife had been a Piper of Pinkmaiden Castle, a girl with big soft breasts
and brown doe's eyes. Instead of healing Urri's hand the Old Way, with fire and sea water, she gave him to her green land
maester, who swore that he could sew back the missing fingers. He did that, and later he used potions and poltices and
herbs, but the hand mortified and Urri took a fever. By the time the maester sawed his arm off, it was too late.


Lord Quellon never returned from his last voyage; the Drowned God in his goodness granted him a death at sea. It was Lord
Balon who came back, with his brothers Euron and Victarion. When Balon heard what had befallen Urri, he removed three of
the maester's fingers with a cook's cleaver and sent his father's Piper wife to sew them back


on. Poltices and potions worked as well for the maester as they had for Urrigon. He died raving, and Lord Quellon's third wife
followed soon thereafter, as the midwife drew a stillborn daughter from her womb. Aeron had been glad. It had been his axe


file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/George%20RR%20Martin...-%20Ice%20and%20Fire%2004%20-%20Arms%20of%20the.htm (7 of 33)16-2-2006 15:51:15
 George R.R. Martin - Arms of the Kraken (A Song of Ice and Fire Book 4 Novella).htm

that sheared off Urri's hand, whilst they danced the finger dance together as friends and brothers will.


It shamed him still to recall the years that followed Urri's death. At six-and-ten he called himself a man, but in truth he had
been a sack of wine with legs. He would sing, he would dance (but not the finger dance, never again), he would jape and
jabber and make mock. He played the pipes, he juggled, he rode horses, and could drink more than all the Wynches and the
Botleys, and half the Harlaws too. The Drowned God gives every man a gift, even him; no man could piss longer or farther
than Aeron Greyjoy, as he proved at every feast. Once he bet his new longship against a herd of goats that he could quench
a hearthfire with no more than his cock. Aeron feasted on goat for a year, and named the longship Golden Storm, though
Balon threatened to hang him from her mast when he heard what sort of ram his brother proposed to mount upon her prow.


In the end the Golden Storm went down off Fair Isle during Balon's first rebellion, cut in half by a towering war galley called
Fury when Stannis Baratheon caught Victarion in his trap and smashed the Iron Fleet. Yet the god was not done with Aeron,
and carried him to shore. Some fishermen took him captive and marched him down to Lannisport in chains, and he spent the
rest of the war in the bowels of Casterly Rock, proving that krakens can piss further and longer than lions, boars, or chickens.


That man is dead. Aeron had drowned and been reborn from the sea, the god's own prophet. No mortal man could frighten
him, no more than the darkness could . . , nor memories, the bones of the soul. The sound of a door opening. The scream of
a rusted iron hinge. Euron has come again. It did not matter. He was the Damphair priest, beloved of the god.


"Will it come to war?" asked Greydon Goodbrother as the sun was lightening the hills. "A war of brother against brother?"


"If the Drowned God wills it. No godless man may sit the Seastone Chair." The Crow's Eye will fight, that is certain. No