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

The hall was almost, but not quite, silent; Sterren could hear a steady
hiss of whispering among the watchers.
"Your Majesty," Lady Kalira said, "may I present your servant Sterren,
Ninth Warlord of Semma." She gestured toward Sterren and stepped aside,
turning so that she stood on the edge of the carpet, her back to the audience
and able to speak to either monarch or Ethsharite.
Thinking some action was called for, Sterren bowed again, from the waist
this time, wishing somebody had seen fit to coach him a little.
"Hello," the king said.
"Hello," Sterren replied nervously. He tried to judge the king's age and
guessed it at something over forty, but almost certainly still short of sixty.
"Are you really Tanissa the Stubborn's grandson? It's hard to believe."
Sterren, still unfamiliar with the language, needed a moment to puzzle
that out and phrase a response. This was not the sort of question he had
expected from a king in what he took for a formal audience. "Yes, I... Yes,
your Majesty, I am," he replied. He was grateful that Lady Kalira had provided
him, in her introduction, with the correct form of address.
"I never met her," the king said, "but I heard about her when I was a
boy, especially from her brother, your great-uncle, that is, the old warlord.
She ran away with that merchant a couple of years before I was born. And
you're really her grandson, are you?"
Sterren nodded.
"There's no need to be shy, lad," the king said, smiling. "After all,
we're all family here."
"We are?" Sterren asked, puzzled.
"Oh, certainly; didn't you know? You're my seventh cousin once removed. I
looked it up." He gestured expansively, taking in the crowd of observers. "And
these," he said, "are the collected nobility of Semma. And all of us, lad, are
descended from Tendel the First, first King of Semma."
"You are?"
"You, too, lad," Phenvel corrected him, gently.
"I am?"
"Yes, indeed; I'm in a direct male line, of course, and you descended
from the second son of Tendel the Second, rather than the first son. You're
also descended from a couple of Tendel the First's daughters, the nobles here
tend to marry back into the family."
This came as something of a shock to Sterren, once he had puzzled out
exactly what had been said, and at first he simply didn't believe it. A king,
one of his ancestors? All these people his relatives? He was in the habit of
thinking of himself as having no family at all; to find himself in a room
crowded with his distant relations was more than he could absorb. He could
imagine no reason for the king to lie about it, however.
"Oh," he said.
"That's one reason you're here, straight from your journey. We all wanted
a look at you, our long-lost cousin."
"Oh," Sterren said again.
This whole situation was beginning to seem unreal. Oh, the castle was
real enough, and the people, he could smell them, as well as see and hear
them, and he'd never heard of an illusion as detailed as that, but the idea
that they were really the ruling class of one of the Small Kingdoms, just a