"R Garcia Y Robertson - Strongbow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robertson R Garcia Y)

ROD GARCIA Y ROBERTSON

STRONGBOW

"These parts are much given to implacable quarrels and domestic feuds. I leave
it to others to tell of the inhuman crimes committed in our own times: marriages
most cruelly brought about, inflicted rather than contracted, only to be cut
short by savage acts of family bloodshed....
--Gerald of Wales, 1191

Wall Walk

CLARE HAD TO WALK THE walls just to breathe. Looking out at morning mist on
hostile Welsh hills, she imagined the smell of death hung over the castle.
Clinging to cold stone. Sunk into the straw and rushes strewn on the stone
floors. Her stepfather was not yet dead, merely dying, but the smell was already
there. As real to Clare as the white mist on the green hills. As real as
Strongbow's ghost.

Unloving and aloof, her stepfather had long been physically deaf, and utterly
blind to her wants and needs. But it shook her to see him lying stricken and
speechless, no longer anchoring her world. Pious to a fault, he slept on
unwashed sheets and put sharp pebbles in his shoes. When he fell sick, the
castle women found that he secretly wore a hair undershirt alive with vermin,
knotted so tightly to his waist that the cords dug at his flesh.

If death came for someone so pious and humble, how could anyone be safe?

Clare had sat vigil in the sick chamber half the night, lulled by women's
prayers and her stepfather's labored breath. At dawn she got up to walk the
walls. No one told her no, or tried to stop her. It felt strange to be suddenly
beyond adult control. To be the heiress, and at thirteen the lady of the castle.

"Good morrow, little whore."

Clare looked up to see her stepbrother, looming large in the morning light,
dressed in his favorite fur-lined tunic and drawers. Edmund had always been
bigger than she. Big, blond, and hateful. He hated her ever since their parents
married, and he realized she stood between him and her mother's inheritance. It
grated that "this tiny slut, this little worthless creature" could keep him from
being lord of Caeradar.

She turned back toward the hills, staring out over Ebbw Vale, muttering a spell
that would send Edmund over the seas to be a harem slave among the Turks.

He took her chin between his thumb and finger, twisting her head around, forcing
her to face him. "I said, Good morrow, bastard sister."