"S. M. Stirling - Draka 05 - Drakas!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

Alexandrian society where he was surrounded by curiousтАФand boldтАФDraka women eager to meet him.

Alexander von Shrakenberg was the host. The setting was the dining hall of his Alexandrian manor, the
largest, grandest dining hall that Gordon had ever seen. Considering that he'd endured many such affairs
in many great homes in many big cities while he'd been in the British army, that was saying a lot.

But, back then, Gordon could afford to be eccentric. He could pick and choose which invitations to
accept and which to decline, and actually he'd declined most of them. His relative isolation from society
had hurt his career, of course, but he didn't care for the vain-glories of fame.

Much,a sly voice whispered silently in his mind.

Gordon patted his lips with his linen napkin.

Down, Agag,he said silently to his private inner demon.I would think you'd be very happy with this
evening. The pomp, the glamour, the vanity of it will give you much ammunition for our debate . .
. later . . .

Agag slipped away, content, perhaps, to merely observe for awhile, and Gordon was glad to be rid of
him, if only for awhile. Agag never completely vanished. He lived in some deep, dark crevice of Gordon's
soul, popping out at the most inopportune times, braying like a fame-starved jackass when Gordon most
desired to be humble, silent, and Christian. By naming him, by actually engaging him in argument, Gordon
refused to accept the fact that Agag was really a part of him. He was a piece hewn apart from Gordon's
whole, because the attitude he represented was unChristian.

Gordon relinquished his fish plate to one of the legion of servants who were ferrying food from the
manor's vast kitchen in seemingly endless rounds. Gordon liked to eat as much as the next man, but
apparently not as much as his host, Alexander von Shrakenberg. Von Shrakenberg was young, not much
over thirty, but unlike most of the Draka Gordon had met, was already fleshy. If he kept up this pace of
eating and drinking he'd be uncontestedly fat within a very few years. He was also quite jolly for a Draka,
full of smiles and had what seemed to be a genuinely hearty laugh. His vast holding on the outskirts of the
Egyptian city of Alexandria consisted of cotton fields and associated mills. The manor at the estate's heart
was huge and decorated in expensive, luxurious, but, Gordon conceded, quite good taste. Besides his
cotton plantation, Von Shrakenberg was also connected with the Alexandria Institute, the foremost
scientific conglomerate on the continent. Gordon had to get the Institute's approval if he hoped for his
plan come to fruition and The Plan, as he thought of it, was now all he had to live for.

Gordon had had an extremely full and adventurous life. He'd been a career soldier, but one more
honored by foreign nations than his own. A field marshall in both the Chinese and Ottoman armies, he'd
also fought in the Crimea, produced the first accurate maps of the Danube River and its tributaries, been
the Governor-General of the Sudan, surveyed the Holy Lands, and discovered the location of the Garden
of Eden.

He'd always had a reputation as an independent eccentric, heedless of conventional wisdom and eager
to flout higher authority in the name of justice. Though a devout fundamentalist Christian, he was not a
bigot. He believed that every man should be left to worship his own particular god in his own particular
way, as long as he worshipedsome god.

Recently it seemed as if perhaps the controversy that he'd thrived on as a younger man had finally caught
up to him. The British Army had no more use for him. Other countries he'd served no longer existed,