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

Anywhere it grows, the baobab is an impressive sight. On the great dead-flat plain of the Kalahari
Desert, where the land stretches empty to the horizon and even a cluster of stunted acacia trees is a
major visual event, a lone baobab can dominate the entire landscape.

This particular baobab is of no more than average size, but it is still the biggest thing in view in any
direction. Beneath its spreading branches, just now, are four men. Three are dead.

The fourth man sits on the ground, his back against the sagging folds of the baobab's thin bark. A lean,
long-limbed, long-faced white man, dressed in dusty brown near-rags barely recognizable as having once
been a smart military uniform; thinning yellow hair straggles from beneath the broad-brimmed hat that
shades his face. His right hand lies on his lap, next to a heavy revolver.

Centurion George Armstrong Custer, of the Kalahari Mounted Police (former Brevet Major General,
United States Cavalry), licks his dry cracked lips. "Libbie," he says, barely aloud, his words no more
than a whisper lost in the whine of the wind through the baobab's branches, "Libbie, is this what it all
comes to?"

***

"I don't know, Custer," the Commandant said, ten days ago. (Wasn't it? Custer realizes he is not sure.)
"A man of your rank and experience, leading a minor patrol like this? Pretty silly, isn't it?"

"Possibly, sir." Custer stood at attention before the Commandant's desk, face expressionless, classic
West Point from crown to boot soles. Not that these Drakians demanded much in the way of military
formalityтАФand the Mounted Police weren't even a military organization, even if they did like to put on
airs and give themselves fancy titles of rankтАФbut it was, Custer had found, a subtle but effective way to
bully Cohortarch Heimbach.
"I need you here," Heimbach continued. "Things to be done, paperwork piled up. Don't stand like that,
Centurion," he added peevishly. "This isn't your American army."

"No, sir," Custer said tonelessly, not shifting a hair, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead above the
Commandant's balding head, exchanging stares with the portrait of Queen Victoria that hung on the
mud-brick wall. Cohortarch Heimbach was one of the handful of conservatives who still insisted on the
fiction of Drakia's membership in the British Empire.

"Things to be done right here," Heimbach repeated. "Instead you want to ride off chasing Bushmen.
Tetrarch Leblanc could use the experience, and he's eager to go."

Custer didn't reply. After a moment Heimbach blew out his breath in a long loud sigh. "Oh, all rightтАФ"

He fumbled in his desk drawer and got out a short-stemmed pipe and a pouch of tobacco. "Actually," he
said, thumbing tobacco into the bowl, "thisis a bit more than a normal patrol. Seems our little friends, out
there, have gone very much too far this time."

Custer waited silently as he lit up. "Two days ago," Heimbach went on after a moment, blowing clouds
of foul-smelling blue smoke, "a bunch of Bushmen raided a cattle ranch in the Ghanzi area. Usual sort of
thingтАФcut a cow out from the herd, killed it and butchered it on the spot, you know."

Custer knew. The Bushmen were constantly bringing trouble on themselves with their addiction to
cattle-rustling. Of course, living as they did on the edge of bare subsistence, they must find the scrawny