"Modesitt, L E - Recluce 10 - Magi'i Of Cyador" - читать интересную книгу автора (Modesitt L E)

"You'll be escorting five wagons-four horse team on each." Byrten glances toward the door, where the rail-thin Chorin reappears, followed by a ranker with a single green slash on his sleeve. Both halt just inside the door. Nytral is short and stocky, and his right cheek bears a faded purple starburst scar. His thick black hair is cut short, and his thick black eyebrows are bushy. The deep brown of his eyes conveys a flatness, as if Nytral has seen too much for his eyes to reveal. The flat eyes look at Lorn, eyes that are wary, waiting.
Lorn extends the set of smaller scrolls. "Undercaptain Lorn'alt. These are your orders."
"Yes, ser." Nytral takes the scrolls, then looks at Lorn'alt.
The two other lancer rankers watch, eyes flicking from Nytral to Lorn.
"You can unroll them," Lorn says. "They're yours, but one copy has to go to Commander Thiataphi's clerk."
"Ah..." suggests Byrten.
"You take it first?" asks Lorn.
"Works better that way, ser." suggests Nytral. "Byrten draws us supplies, and he can't draw for more than we got on roster."
Lorn nods, wondering how much more he needs to learn, and whether he can-in time. "If there's nothing else Byrten needs to tell me... ?" He looks at the senior clerk.
"No, ser. Just check every morning. Tomorrow we should have the replacement roster done, and the supply list."
"I'd like Nytral to look at those with me," Lorn says.
"Yes, ser."
The undercaptain looks at his squad leader. "Let's go on outside, Nytral."
"Yes, ser." Nytral's voice is deferential, but level.
After leaving the support building, Lorn crosses the small courtyard until he stands in the shadowed corner on the southeast side. Then he turns to Nytral. "I understand you'll be able to let me know what I should know and don't on the way to Isahl." Lorn offers a smile, one simultaneously open and yet professional.
Nytral does not return the smile. "Could be, ser."
Lorn laughs, gently. "I know chaos, firelances, and blades. I don't know lancers and barbarians, and you do, or you wouldn't be a squad leader assigned to a green officer. I also don't know what supplies we should have, and what we might get shorted. You do."
Nytral's lips crinkle slightly. "There be that, ser."
"More than that, I'm sure." Lorn laughs self-deprecatingly. "Do you know where I draw a mount? And how we can find out about just what our replacement lancers are like?"
"Wouldn't be much good to you, if'n I didn't, ser."
"Let's start with finding my room so I can drop off this kit, and then look for the kind of mount that will be best for Isahl." Lorn smiles. "Lead on."
Nytral gestures toward the three-story, narrow, barrack-like building in the northeast corner of the compound. "There." He walks out of the shade across the white paving stones of the courtyard. "Front entrance there is to the officer's rooms. You can take whatever one you want on the top level. Stables are out back, beyond the wall...."
Lorn matches steps with the squad leader, listening, and yet studying the compound, trying to memorize where everything is.


XX

After having selected a mount, and getting a tour of the rest of the Mirror Lancer compound from Nytral, Lorn finds himself yawning more and more as they walk back from the armory, a heavy-walled and squat building located inside another set of walls in the northwest corner of the compound. Lorn's boots are scuffing the stone as well.
"Ser... begging your pardon, but best you get some sleep afore you eat with the senior officers tonight." Nytral glances at Lorn.
"Because they'll be sizing up the new undercaptain? You're probably right, and there's not too much more I can do until tomorrow anyway." Lorn yawns again. "I'll see you in the morning, and we can go over the supplies and everything."
"Yes, ser."
Lorn turns and walks back to the quarters building, and up two long flights of steps. His room is stark-one narrow pallet bed, a small table by the bed with an oil lamp, a single armless wooden chair, and a set of wooden pegs on the wall for hanging uniforms. The single window bears ancient glass, and the shutters are inside the casement.
After slipping the latch bar in place behind him, Lorn levers off his boots and strips to his small clothes. By then he is struggling to keep his eyes open.
Despite his fatigue, Lorn wakes in mid-afternoon, in a chill. As he was sleeping, someone had been screeing him, and it had not been his father. But why? To see that he was indeed where he had been sent?
He rolls upright and rubs his eyes. Since he is awake, he rises and then uses the cold shower in the semi-communal bathing chamber in the middle of the uppermost floor. After drying and dressing in a clean set of lancer whites, he heads back to the outpost support building where some discreet inquiries of Chorin locate the officer's laundry service, set, obviously, in the rear of the ground floor level of the quarters building.
Lorn returns to his room and carries his soiled whites down to the small room where a gray-haired and bare-footed woman in gray stands over a wash tub, swirling the wash with a wooden paddle. A second thigh-high tub stands to her right. The odors of warmish water and soap fill the bare-walled space.
Lorn waits, but the woman does not turn in his direction. Finally, he clears his throat.
She looks up, then steps toward him. "Ser... ser... those I cannot wash until tomorrow."
"That's fine."
"A copper for each uniform, you know."
Lorn nods. "There is just one."
She bobs her head and takes the uniform. "Tomorrow night."
"Thank you." Even before he finishes his words, the washerwoman has set his whites on a table by the tub and is back at work with the wooden paddle. He steps outside, into a gentle, but unseasonably warm breeze for winter in Syadtar-that is what he feels. He checks the white garrison cap, although the breeze is scarcely strong enough to worry about.
There is time before dinner. So he walks around the compound, studying more carefully what Nytral had shown him earlier. Under grayish-green tiled roofs, the buildings are of clean-lined granite and sunstone, the granite for the main walls, and the sunstone for the minimal trim and arches. Both types of stone have been bleached out by time and the residual impact of the chaos-chisel cutting used to shape the stone blocks. With the late afternoon sun glinting on the windows of Thiataphi's headquarters, Lorn can see that some of the window panes are clearer than others, by the reflection of both light and the chaos within the sunlight. The window casements are all of stained and weathered white oak, but barely visible, since all the shutters in the compound are inside the windows.
The outpost building, although old, has been added to the compound later.
Lorn smiles as Chorin hurries out the door and scurries toward Thiataphi's headquarters.
"...two, three..."
At the sound of cadence-calling, Lorn turns to watch a line of men in white marching along the west wall of the compound, just outside the shade.
"...have to march before you ride... two, three... keep the chaos on your side... two, three..." calls a burly squad leader, breaking the cadence to add, "You're not tough, and the barbarians will eat you like honeycakes... pick it up in the rear!"
Hoofs clatter on the stones, and a Mirror Lancer in white, wearing the red sash of a messenger, rides up to the hitching post outside Thiataphi's headquarters, dismounts, hurriedly ties his mount, and rushes inside carrying a white leather dispatch pouch.