"Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 02 - Ancients of Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

"The blow to the head has given you delusions, master. You believe yourself a soldier."
"And you believe that you are my squire, so we are equally deluded. Hush, now. We will
speak of what you heard when Tamora has finished with our poor warriors."
 Tamora had jumped on to a square stone plinth which had once supported a statueтАФonly its
feet remained, clad in daintily pointed slippers which still retained traces of yellow pigment. She
looked at the six decads of thralls who had gathered around her, allowing scorn to darken her
small, triangular face. It was a trick she had taught Yama. To be a teacher, she said, was to be an
actor first.
Unless delivered from the heart, no lesson could be convincing.
The thralls were all of the same bloodline, lean and long-armed and bowlegged, with loose
gray skin that hung in heavy folds from bony joints. They had long, vulpine faces, untidy manes
of coarse black or umber hair that tumbled down their bent backs and muddy yellow or green
eyes that peered out from beneath heavy brows. They were a stupid and frustratingly obdurate
bloodline. According to Syle, the Secretary of the Department of Vaticination, their families had
served here for more than twenty thousand years. But although they were naturally servile, the
unaccustomed drill had made them sullen and mutinous, and they took every opportunity to make
it clear that Tamora and Yama had no real authority over them. They glared at Tamora, sharp
teeth pricking their thin black lips, as she told them how badly they had done.
She said, "You have all taken your turn at defense, and you have all taken your turn at
attack. You should know that if you are to win through or stand firm, you must stay in formation.
A defending rank is only as strong as its weakest member. If he falls, someone must immediately
take his place. If an attacking formation breaks through a line, it must stay together."
One of the thralls said, "They ran and we chased 'em down, mistress. What's wrong with
that?"
Tamora stared at the man until he lowered his gaze.
She said, "There might be reserves waiting behind a turn in a corridor. If your disorganized
rabble ran into them, then you'd be quickly slaughtered."
"But there wasn't anyone else," the thrall mumbled, and those around him muttered in
agreement.
Tamora raised her voice. "This is an exercise. When you fight for real, you can't assume
anything. That's why you must fight as you're told, not as you want. It's very easy to kill one man
on his own, much harder to kill him when he's part of a formation. When you fight shoulder to
shoulder, you defend those on either side of you, and they defend you. That way you don't have
to worry about the enemy getting behind your back, because to do that they'd have to get around
the line. And they won't, not in the corridors. Elsewhere, in the open, you fight in squares, as you
tried yesterday."
When Tamora paused for breath, a thrall stepped out of the front rank and said, "We'd do
better, mistress, if we had proper weapons."
"I'll break open the armory when you've mastered those sticks," Tamora said. "From what
I've just seen, I've a mind to take the sticks away."
The thrall did not back down. He was taller than the rest, if only because he was straight-
backed. There were streaks of gray in his long mane. Most of the thralls possessed only one or
two dim fireflies, but six hung in a neat cluster above his head, burning nearly as brightly as
Tamora's. He said, "We won't be fighting with these sticks, so why do we practice with them?"
The thralls muttered and nudged each other, and Pandaras told Yama, "That's what they've
been complaining about, down in the kitchens."
Yama felt a sudden hot anger. He strode forward and confronted the gray-maned thrall. "It is
discipline, not weapons, that makes a fighting force," he said loudly.
"Between all of you, there is not the discipline to attack a nest of rats."
The thrall returned Yama's glare. He said, "Beg your pardon, dominie, but we do know a bit