"Joel Rosenberg - Hidden Ways 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenberg Joel C)

through a battlefield full of enemies, but he had long since lost his taste for such things.

Amazing, really, for one who had waded through rivers of blood to now eschew even an easy slaughter of a tree.

He had started with the undercut, properly low, facing in the direction he wanted the tree to fall, and men walked around the base
of the tree and started in on the other side. The old pine was stronger than he had expected: the final cut almost met the undercut
before, with loud cracks of protest, the tree started to lean, and then to fall.

The butt-end of the tree kicked back against his shoulder, sending his axe flying end over end one way, kicking Harbard back
easily his own length, knocking him flat.

With a swallowed curseтАФhe had long ago learned to curse only deliberatelyтАФhe rose, dusting himself off, working his shoulder,
trying to pretend it didn't hurt. Had he been braced for it, he could have resisted, but he had been lazy and sloppy in his old age,
and he hadn't expected it.

Old one, he thought to himself, it's as well you've long ago put yourself out to pasture. Even just a century ago, he wouldn't have
stood in the way of a tree he was chopping.

Oh, well. He picked up the axe and walked to the base of the fallen pine, stripping off wrist-thick branches with quick strokes of
the axe, only stopping when the trunk thinned out a few bodylengths from the top. He quickly severed the top of the tree, then set
his axe down and stripped off the bark with his fingers, shoving them through the rough bark, peeling the tree like a banana. There
was something pleasurable about chopping the tree the way an ephemeral would, but stripping the bark with the axe while
avoiding cutting into the wood would be a tedious task, and Harbard drew a careful distinction between regularity and tedium.

In minutes, what had been a tree was a naked log and a scattering of bark and branches that would have to be dealt with later, as
when they dried they would become violently flammable tinder.

He found the center of the log and moved back a careful step toward the base to allow for its greater thickness, then stooped to
pick it up by its balance, hefting it to his shoulder with a grunt. It was heavy. The trees seemed to get heavier each decade.

His bare feet sank ankle-deep into the packed dirt of the path that led downhill, past his cottage, toward the ferry landing. More
than two dozen logs lay in a single row, crosswise across two short lengths of stone fence, aging and drying in the sun; Harbard
set this one down on the newer end of the pile, using a series of small wooden wedges to separate it from the next one over, then
set his hands on his hips.

Enough? It was hard to say. Maintaining his ferry barge was a matter of constantly replacing rotting logs, and while it was a
certainty that the ones that now made up the floor of the barge would need replacement, it was not at all a certainty when.

Harbard allowed himself a grin. That was true for so much else.

High above in the blue, cloud-spattered sky, a raven slowly circled down, riding wind currents with its huge wings, never so much
as flapping.

"Greetings, Hugin," Harbard said, in a language that was older than the sagging hills that rose behind the cottage. "What word
have you?"

"War," the raven cawed. "War, and rumors of war."