"Terry McConnel - Highlander - Scimitar" - читать интересную книгу автора (McConnel Terry)

and slashed at the air, his wrist twisting. He put his back into it;
the blade shrieked as if it had a life of its own, and stopped a
fraction of an inch from the chair. He raised it again, inspecting the
edge, and ran his thumb along it.

Joe winced as blood welled up and ran down the metal. MacLeod cursed,
sucking at the cut and setting the sword down, carefully, to reach for a
soft cloth.

The cloth wasn't for the cut. The cut, in fact, was almost gone by the
time the man removed his thumb from his mouth, and he dried saliva and
leftover blood on the leg of his jeans and took up the sword again to
clean away the red stain on the blade.

Joe had seen this before, a hundred times, and it still sent a chill
through him. The cut had been deep, to the bone; enough blood had
flowed to run clear to the base of the man Is thumb; now there was no
sign of it. MacLeod didn't appear even to notice. He was polishing the
blade with slow, even, practiced strokes. The muscles in the corner of
his mouth tightened in what might have been a reminiscent smile.

He obviously knew the weapon. The polishing was a welcoming of an old
acquaintance, a smoothing away of years of separation. From the
expression on his face, the scimitar represented both good memories and
painful ones.

"How old is it?" Joe asked, very quietly. He could see, now, that the
inlaid inscription was so worn down in places as to be illegible; the
enameling had chipped out in two places. There was a dent in the hilt.
The silver was badly tarnished, nearly black in places.

"I don't know," MacLeod said thoughtfully, still absorbed in the
polishing. "At lest three hundred and fifty years. Someone's making me
a very nice gift."

"You've been looking for it, then?"

"No, not really. I'm glad to have it, though." He looked up, past his
visitor, as if searching for the right spot on the wall.

"Whose was it?"

"It belonged to one of my very first teachers," MacLeod said. "He was a
good man."

That was one of the good memories, Joe could tell. As well as one of
the painful ones.

And how, he wondered, could someone like MacLeod untangle them, after so
many years? More than four hundredhow many swords had he seen in four