"Christopher Stasheff - Rogue Wizard 07 - A Wizard In Midgard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stasheff Christopher)

yet.
"Aw, can't get up?" the overseer crooned, than snapped, "Crawl, then! That will
remind you what a worm you really are!"
Magnus told himself that the slaves needed the kind of sympathy that can only
come from shared suffering, and crawled into the field. Other slaves glanced up
at him, then quickly glanced away.
"Well, you're close enough to the ground that you don't need a hoe," Kawsa told
him. "Grub with your hands!"
He watched while Magnus pulled a dozen weeds, then walked on down the row, but
glanced back frequently.
A very short man in the next row spoke out of the side of his mouth, carefully
not looking at Magnus. "Whatever possessed you to go marching down the high road
dressed like a freeman in broad daylight, poor lad?"
"I'm from far away," Magnus told him, "very far, beyond the borders of this
land. I didn't know."
"From the North Country?" The man looked up, surprized, then remembered the
overseer and turned his gaze back to his hoe. "Then your parents must have been
slaves who escaped, and should have told you what it was like herel I thought
everyone knew how things were in Midgaad!"
"I'm from farther than that," Magnus told him, but registered the name of the
country well, to remember it. Midgard? Well, it did go with the horned
helmets....
Again the man stared at him, but only for a second. Then studying his hoe blade,
he muttered, "Didn't know there were people farther away."
"I'm real," Magnus assured him. "I didn't know what I was getting into."
And that, he decided, was nothing but the honest truth. At least he had expected
to see dwarves, too. He had seen them in the pictures from orbit, after he and
Herkimer had explored Midgard's eastern border.
"Let's see how the western border compares with this one, Herkimer."
"Initiating acceleration," the computer replied, but the artificial gravity
within the ship was so excellent that Magnus felt no change. "Should we examine
the northern border on the way?"
"No point," Magnus said. "Your photographs show it to be a wasteland with only a
few small settlements." He looked down at the pictures on the table before him,
aerial photos of the planet's one inhabited continent.
Some were large-scale, some small; some showed the country as a whole, some only
single villages, some even closeups of just a few people. "Wattle and daub huts,
thatched roofs, wooden wheels on their wagons, clothing limited to tunics and
bias-hosen for the men, blouses and skirts for the women, hooded cloaks for both
... yes, it looks very much like the Scandinavian Middle Ages."
"Too much so?" the computer supplied.
"Definitely. Someone set about a deliberate imitation, but wasn't a stickler for
historical accuracy." Magnus couldn't rid himself of the feeling that he was
looking at a gigantic stage set.
"We have come to the dawn line," Herkimer reported. "Good." Magnus turned back
to the viewscreens. "Is there a natural border?"
"Yes, a river, and the land beyond it is thickly forested."
"Scan it for signs of battle-there!"
The view on the screen steadied, showing a bird's-eye view of two straggling
lines of dots facing three rings of other dots, smooth with geometric precision.