"Shirley Meier & S. M. Stirling - Fifth Millenium 03 - The Cage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Meier Shirley)

us more if you didn't keep dinning your presence into his ears?"

"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 been much 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
what did 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. The Zinghut 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. ExileтАФwell, 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 magicтАж
 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 herтАж