"Christopher Rowley - Bazil 01 - Bazil Broketail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowley Christopher)

behavior; we are playthings to them in this. But for a witch it is a deadly
crime, a slip into abomination.тАЭ

And thus had Fundament Day been ruined, although she had learned
with considerable relief, at the medical examination which followed her
interview with Flavia, that no imp had been quickened in her womb.
 She had wept many, bitter tears since then. And rerun through her
mind again and again the awful humiliation of that moment when Helena
of Roth, LagdalenтАЩs most bitter enemy, had pulled open the door and
shown the proctors what was going on in the little laundry room at the
back of the dormitory.

Helena was a senior novice, and she took particular pleasure in
disciplining the тАЬlittle Tarcho brat.тАЭ Lagdalen recalled, with a
spine-chilling thrill of horror, the vindictive laughter with which Helena
had greeted LagdalenтАЩs arrest and removal to FlaviaтАЩs office.

And now she drudged, mucking out the stalls of sixty horses. Of course
the stable boys who normally did this work, but were excused on
Fundament Day, had left all the dirt and straw down from the previous
two days. They knew that on Fundament Day there was normally some
poor wretch enjoined to work there all day for punishment.

She lifted another shovelful of manure and cast it into the barrow; the
job ahead of her was mountainous. It would take her all day to rake it and
shift it.

Wearily she filled the barrow, lifted it, and trundled it off to the
composter heap. This was set in a covered pit just inside the Old Gate,
under the looming walls of the tower. To reach it she had to leave the
stables and negotiate the smoothly polished cobblestones of the Tower
Yard, where the barracks troops performed their drill. This was the
dangerous part of the passage, for not a drop of the contents of her barrow
could be left on the cobbles for fear of old Sappino the Yardkeeper, whose
obsession was the polish on his cobbles. Loud would be his complaints if
she made a mess. Long would she kneel polishing the stones if Sappino
complained to Headmistress Flavia.

Outside the stables, which were protected by a spell, the fat flies of
summer still buzzed vigorously in the sunlight, and they soon discovered
her cargo.

Lagdalen hated flies, and she quickly tried to cast her own fly spell. But
it took two full declensions and a paragraph from the Birrak, and she
made a mistake in the declensions. The flies continued to buzz, oblivious
to the botched spell.

With a curse of woe, flies settling on her face, in her hair, around her
eyes, Lagdalen pushed the barrow as fast as it would go over the cobbles of
the yard to the compost pit.