"01 - Sword Dancer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Jennifer)

Sword DancerSword Dancer
Book 1 of the Sword Dancer series.
By Jennifer Roberson




Sword Dancer
Table of Contents
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve,
Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty,
Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four





One
In my line of work, I've seen all kinds of women. Some beautiful. Some ugly.
Some just plain in between. And--being neither senile nor a man with aspirations
to sainthood--whenever the opportunity presented itself (with or without my
encouragement), I bedded the beautiful ones (although sometimes they bedded me),
passed on the ugly ones altogether (not being a greedy man), but allowed myself
discourse with the in-betweeners on a fairly regular basis, not being one to
look the other way when such things as discourse and other entertainments are
freely offered. So the in-betweeners made out all right, too.
But when she walked into the hot, dusty cantina and slipped the hood of her
white burnous, I knew nothing I'd ever seen could touch her. Certainly Ruth and
Numa couldn't, though they were the best the cantina had to offer. I was so
impressed with the new girl I tried to swallow my aqivi the wrong way and wound
up choking so badly Ruth got off my left knee and Numa slid off my right. Ruth
commenced pounding on my back awhile and Numa--well-meaning as ever--poured more
aqivi and tried to tip it down a throat already afire from the stuff.
By the time I managed to extricate myself from both of them (no mean feat), the
vision in the white burnous had looked away from me and was searching through
the rest of the cantina with eyes as blue as Northern lakes.
Now it so happens I haven't ever seen any Northern lakes, being a Southroner
myself, but I knew perfectly well those two pools she used for eyes matched the
tales I'd heard of the natural wonders of the North.
The slipping of the hood bared a headful of thick, long hair yellow as the sun
and a face pale as snow. Now I haven't seen snow either, being as the South has
the monopoly on sand, but it was the only way to describe the complexion of a
woman who was so obviously not a native Southroner. I am, and my skin is burned
dark as a copper piece. Oh, I suppose once upon a time I might have been
lighter--must've been, actually, judging by the paler portions of my anatomy not
exposed to daylight--but my work keeps me outdoors in the sun and the heat and
the sandstorms, so somewhere along the way my skin got dark and tough and--in
all the necessary places--callused.
Oddly enough, the stuffiness of the cantina faded. It almost seemed cooler, more
comfortable. But then it might have had more to do with shock than anything