"Andre Norton - WW - Horn Crown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

ued. "I will lead the Brothers for the sea party."

Garn nodded, giving no farewell, as he turned on his
heel and, with the rest of us, tramped back to our own
camp which was some little distance from the council
place, saying nothing to us.

Though I was well tired by the journeying of the
day -- the everlasting matching of our pace to the slow
turn of wain wheels -- yet as I drew my cloak about me
and used my saddle pad as a pillow, I did not at once fall
asleep. One could hear the small sounds of the camp. A
child was crying in a weak, fretting way where the women
sheltered -- probably Stig's grandson who ailed. I could
hear, too, the movements of our stock as they grazed the
tough, thick grass already well above the earth's edge for
spring, and now and then the snort of a sleeper or a
snore. Garn had gone into the small tent which was his
alone. From where I lay I could see the spark of a strike
light and then the thin gleam of a lantern candle. Perhaps
he was again studying the lot fortune had given him.

I had thought fortune too favoring and been wary, then
I had heard of Tugness's luck and believed that this was
the ill part which I had sought to find. If our future hold-
ing marched with his we must learn to live in a state bet-

ter than an uneasy truce. This was an unknown land from
whence the former inhabitants had withdrawn -- the why
we did not know. Though the Bards and the Scouts had
stressed that there were no enemies, still there was a lone-
liness, a land of withdrawal, which I, for one, felt the far-
ther I rode. We might well need to depend on neighbors
even if such lived a day's journey away. This would be
the time when all men of Hallack must stand together, old
quarrels and enmities forgotten.

This was not Hallack -- that lay behind, lost forever.
Those of our company had come to call it High Hallack,
since it was a country of many hills. This it would be
named in bardic memory from the hour we crossed into
it.

Still sleep did not come, though the lantern candle
winked out. I turned my head to look up into the night,
seeking stars I knew. Then there was a coldness which
crept across me, roughened my skin, and brought a prick-
ling beneath my hair. For none of those groupings of stars
was what I had known all my life. Where was the Arrow,
the Bull, the Hunter's Horn? There was no tracing of any