"Mitchell Smith - Moonrise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

as well. Boston and its Made-creatures stepping lightly in country of the King's Rule.
Newton should have caught up those reins at his crowning, set the bit hard at once тАФ with his
adopted brother to help him. But Newton had been young, thoughtful, and kind. And his brother had gone
hunting.
And now, was hunted... and deserved to be. It didn't occur to Bajazet to even wonder if Newton
were still alive. Cooper and his friends тАФ known also as friends of Boston тАФ would have made no such
blunder. As they must also have considered Newton's brother, and found him worthy of at least casual
killing.
... He lay beneath his icy log into the evening, and made no noise, though his nose ran from weeping,
his empty stomach muttered as glass-hours went by. Lying huddled there, Bajazet found that the rapier
thrust, broken wrist, and bruised balls of almost two years before, had been no pain at all compared to the
loss of loved ones.
Daylight faded slowly to nearly dark, so he lay safer though aching with cold, heard no hunting horns,
and dreamed an uneasy dream of being warm and fed. A celebration, a shifting remembrance of Tom
MacAffee's welcome dinner, Boston's Ambassador sent to Island after years of none, and bad feelings....
The food at Bajazet's place, set on hammered silver, was lamb-chops, roasted carrots, and potatoes. He
saw this clearly, and seemed to eat, but тАФ distracted by MacAffee's laughter тАФ somehow never quite
chewed and swallowed, though he tried to keep his mind to it. In his dream, he did consider how clever
Boston had been to send a fat and cheery man to represent so frozen and grim a state, its nastiness born in
palaces of ice.
Bajazet dreamed, but was filled by no dream food, warmed not at all by the six great iron Franklins
rumbling down the dining hall. He did watch the king and Queen Rachel, and stole glances at Newton,
sitting beside him, with great attention, as if to be certain of remembering them, though his dream offered no
reason for it.
... From the colors and confusion of that lamp-lit banquet, Bajazet woke тАФ trembling with cold, sick
with hunger тАФ to the odor of leaf-mold, wet wood, and soaked snow. The evening wind, come with fading
light, hissed in the trees. That wind mentioned death as it passed over, so тАФ with lying still and dying the
alternative тАФ he rolled stiffly out onto frozen mud, sheathed rapier tangling his legs, and tugged folds of his
cloak free of skim-ice. He managed up onto all fours, crawled a little way cramped and sore as if badly
beaten... then, grunting like an old man with the effort, staggered to his feet to stand hunched, shivering in
darkness.
"What...?" Bajazet asked aloud, as if his First and Second fathers both lived, and stood under the
trees, listening. They listened, perhaps, but didn't answer him.
What should be done? What could be done, but run or die тАФ and more likely run then die?
His First-father would likely have said, "Surprise is the mother of victories." But what surprise was
possible, now? The hunters would hunt again in morning light тАФ and be surprised only by how long it had
taken to catch and kill him.
"Lessons learned?" His Second-father had asked in the Glass Garden.
Among the answers: a decisive blow may be struck in retreat.
Feeling faint, Bajazet leaned against a birch for strength, and felt that unless he attempted
something, sorrow and shame would kill him, sure as the cavalrymen. He would fail, and wish to fail, and
the horsemen or the cold would catch him. тАФ Why not, instead of certain losing, at least attend his fathers'
lessons?
"Something," he said to the tree. "Something surprising... and attempted by a man in retreat." He'd
called himself a man, to the birch, and supposed now he would have to be one while he lasted, and no
longer only a young prince, the king's ward, and in so many ways still a boy.
He stroked the tree's sheeted bark as if the birch were a friend, and cared for him. "Good-bye," he
said to it, imagined a poem about the dignity of its stillness, so superior to mens' foolish motions... then found
the dog star through the birch's branches, and began to walk west, back toward the river, the way he'd
come. It seemed a strange and foolish thing to do, to pay a debt of honor owed only to the dead, and