"Fifth Millennium - 03 - The Cage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Meier Shirley)

"Hai!" Shkai'ra snorted. "He'd be mortally offended if I ignored him. After all, if it hadn't been for him, Fehinna would have beenmuch worse." She sighed: her memories of that kingdom of peculiar savageries were happy, mostly. It was where Megan and she had met, after all; Megan come west-over-sea across the Lannic, she herself wandering down from the interior of Almerkun, from the prairies.

"Imagine the things that could have gone wrong on top of whatdid happen." she continued.

Ten-Knife-Foot stretched and stalked regally across the bed and out the open window. Shkai'ra's mood darkened; the cat walked a little more stiffly than he had. TheZinghut Muth'a , the Black Crone, had her hand on him, as on all that lived.

What hasn't gone wrong for me, one time or another? she thought. ExileЧwell, that had been her own choice. Bitter memory arose: Stonefort, in the Komman of Granfor. The draughty halls of the keep and smoking fires and the roaring clamor of the Salute rising to the morning sun from a tower. Riding the spring steppe, through a foam of flowers, a sweetness so strong it made you drunk like lifewater or cloudberry mead; the bow in her hands and the coughing grunt of the tiger about to charge. Feasting, dancers wild with dream-smoke leaping the firetrench; the pride of bearing the god-born Mek Kermak blood, offering to the Mighty Ones; victory, glory ...

And winter bivouacs, her mind prompted. Riding picket against nomad raiders, sacked villages and children roasted and eaten over the embers of their homes. Fleas and filth and cruelty, the endless intrigues of power, knives in the dark, poison in the cup, arrows out of the sloughgrass thickets. Each season a repetition of the last, fighting to hold the wild folk at bay long enough to bring in the harvest. The bottomless black pits of a shamans eyes, windows into a soul rotted empty with drugs and sacrifice and magicЕ

Long years after that. Drifting southward from the valley of the Red River, selling the skills with horse and lance and bow that were all a Kommanz aristocrat knew. A mercenary's life, a war without purpose or end; squalid siege camps and the dread of fever, loot that always somehow dribbled through your fingers and left you with less than you had before. One campaign after another, fly-blown bodies under southern suns, peasants staring at you with sick brutalized eyes as you rode by the swollen-bellied village children, a comrade's scream as the pikepoint went into her belly, climbing a storming-ladder as the flamethrower nozzles turned their blackened snouts toward herЕ

Until I reached the shores of the Lannic and met you, she thought, looking up from her musings to Megan.Since then it's all seemedЕ fresher, somehow. Or is it only that you had a purpose, and a goal?

"Fehinna wasЕ" She paused. "Fun."

Megan snorted. "If you definefun as nearly being eaten alive in the sewers by the crawlers, tortured, chased by the SniffersЕ"

Shkai'ra lay back on the bed and linked her hands behind her head. "Fun rescuing you, kheeredo," she amplified. "And just think, Baiwun hammer me flat and Jaiwun strike me barren, if I hadn't decided to rescue you one more time on the docks, I wouldn't have been chased on board ship and you wouldn't have had someone to look after you all these weary yearsЧ"

"Rescue?" Megan whirled and pounced, landing with knees astride Shkai'ra's chest, grabbed a red-blonde braid in each hand. "If I had to list all the times a certain loud, clumsy, often drunken, large, over-sexedЧ" She interrupted herself to pull Shkai'ra's head up to kiss her. "Чbarbarian had to berescued! How about the beams of a certain sweet factory? Or a plank floating on the open ocean? Or a ledge inЧ" Shkai'ra reached up and shut her up by kissing her, grabbed her in a hug around her back and rolled on top of her. Megan went with it, relaxed, wrapped her legs around and squeezed.

The Kommanza smiled, gasped and wheezed, "hhEnough! You'll squeeze the breath out of me!" With one hand she reached up and began tickling Megan under the short ribs and they rolled over on the bed, wrestling. Then the Kommanza had her pinned, used her weightЧ

"Shkai'ra. Let. Go." Megan's voice was flat. She lay still under Shkai'ra, her good-natured struggles gone in the snap of a finger. Shkai'ra heard the panic in her voice and stopped, let go. This had happened before. Somehow the old fear would well up in the Zak woman, a fear that Sarngeld, who had owned her when she was a child, had carefully cultivated.The one asshole's making her vulnerable to the second , Shkai'ra thought. Megan lay still, clenched her fists so she wouldn't claw her lover, and shivered.

"I'm sorry,akribhan . I try. I try so hard sometimes but when you just hold me down, I look up and it doesn't matter that I love you, that I know you, that you'd never hurt meЕ"

"Shush, I know. It's all right, kh'eeredo." Shkai'ra grinned, a bit forcedly, and tickled Megan's chin with one of her braids. "I know it isn't me you're afraid of." She hugged, warm and careful. More careful than anyone outside this room would have believed. She raised herself on one elbow and traced Megan's mouth as the Zak lay in the crook of her arm, looking troubled. "It's getting better. I should know."

Megan turned and pressed her face into Shkai'ra's shoulder. "I'm just tired of being afraid."

"I know." Over the Zak's dark head, Shkai'ra's face darkened as she thought of Sarngeld, but he was dead and out of reach. Ten-Knife jumped up on the bed, looking proud of himself, and dropped a large dead rat on them; his first kill on a new territory. Megan laughed at Shkai'ra's shout of outrage.

"Out! OUT, you rabid night-stalker! Oh,sheepshit , Megan, he's gone under the bed with it. Stop laughing! It isn't funny at all!"

Chapter Two

а

MANOR OF THE SLEEPING DRAGON
F'TALEZON, UPPER BREZHAN RIVER NEW CHEAPSTREET, NEAR THE LADY SHRINE
TENTH IRON CYCLE, SIXTH DAY

Habiku threw himself down by the lapdesk under the east window, smiling.

He was a small man, though tall for one with Zak blood, with fine-chiseled features, somewhat gone to good living, as if a sculptor had taken a statue of a strongly muscled athlete and coated it with an inch of yellow tallow that had sagged with heat. His eyes were a clear amber color, and the curly brown hair still refused to be tamed by a comb, dropping one lock down over his right eye. His cream-colored tunic was immaculate, with white lace at the throat as well as the wrists.

"Master." Lixa, his debt-slave, handed him his goblet. Her voice was soft nd pleasing. "There is word from the south." The rain was turning to light, slushy snow. He looked at her and was annoyed by her quietness. He had worked hard to get it, but had bought the woman for her wildness as well as her resemblance to the deadЕ He leaned back into the office cushions. Windows ringed them all around save where the door led to the stairwell; it had beenher office, asshe had furnished it. The cushions, the teakwood lapdesk and hangings were from all along the Brezhan, even an abstract piece from the teRyadn steppe to the east. Of course,he no longer had to defer to her love of barrenness; there were Raku spirit-poles between the windows now, carved scarlet satin-wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. On a bronze stand was a Hriis prayer-box, fantastically ornate with gold and scrollwork. Idly, he wondered how the Karibal river pirates had come by it. Luckily they had no eye for fine things; brightness and gaud caught their eye, like magpies, and they charged accordingly.Although they've acquired a shrewd sense ofwhat gold means to us , he mused; it was odd, considering that they were scarcely even human, now. Schotter had picked it out for him, down in Brahvniki; the Thane merchant had a talent for finding jewels among trash. He raised an immaculate eyebrow at Lixa.