"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Ethshar 3 - The Unwilling Warlord" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

Akalla did not encourage him to seek out others.
He had gathered that Semma lay somewhere inland, and that Akalla of the
Diamond was the nearest seaport to it. He was not yet clear on whether Akalla
was a separate country, a conquered province, or a district within the kingdom
of Semma. The truth was that he didn't much care, since it did not seem
relevant to any plans to escape back to Ethshar.
And Akalla looked like a place that very few people cared about. It
consisted of three or four streets lined with small shops and houses, all
huddled onto a narrow stretch of beach in the castle's shadow, between two
jagged stretches of broken cliffs.
The buildings of the town were built of some sort of yellowish blocks
that looked more like brick than stone, but were far larger than any bricks
Sterren was familiar with. The joints all seemed to be covered with faded
greenery, brown mosses or gray lichen or half-dead ivy climbing the walls. The
roofs were of turf, with thin, scorched brown grass on top. He saw very few
windows. Flies buzzed in clouds above the streets, and the few people who were
visible on those streets seemed to be curled up asleep, completely covered by
dirty white robes. The whole place smelled of dry rot.
Sterren was not at all impressed by the town.
The castle was far more impressive, but it, too, was streaked with dying
plant life and seemed lifeless, almost abandoned.
As Sterren watched the sailors tying up to the dock, he asked the soldier
beside him, not Alder, but the other one, Alder's comrade Dogal d'Gra, how far
it was to Semma.
Rather, he tried to ask that, but his limited knowledge of Semmat forced
him to say instead, "How many leagues is Semma?" That assumed that he was
using the correct word for leagues and hadn't screwed up the grammar
somewhere.
What he had thought was a simple question plunged his guard into deep
concentration; the Semman muttered to himself, saying in Semmat, "Akalla,
maybe one; Skaia, four or five; Ophkar, hmm."
Finally, after considerable calculation, he arrived at an answer.
"Twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen leagues."
Sterren knew the numbers up to twenty beyond any question, and a good
many beyond with reasonable confidence, but to be sure he held up his ten
fingers and said, "And two, three more?"
Dogal nodded. "Yeah."
Horrified, Sterren stared back out at the port. Thirteen leagues? The
entire city of Ethshar was little more than a league from corner to corner,
yet he had never managed to explore it all. It took a good hour just to walk
from Westgate to the Arena, more, if traffic was heavy. They would have to
walk all night to reach Semma!
In the event, as he later learned, they would not walk at all, and
certainly not at night. Instead, when the ship was secured at bow and stern
and the gangplank in place, he found himself escorted not out onto the highway
to Semma, but to a small inn near the docks, small by Sterren's standards,
that is, since it was, except for the castle, the largest structure in town.
The interpreter, to Sterren's consternation, stayed behind on the ship;
he had fulfilled his contract and would not be accompanying them further.
Upon learning this, Sterren suddenly wished he had tried even harder