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

Sterren stared at the decaying, sun-bleached town of Akalla of the
Diamond in dismay. It lived up to his worst imaginings of what the barbaric
Small Kingdoms would be like.
He had been given very little warning of what to expect. His captors had
spirited him out of the tavern, paused at his room on Bargain Street only long
enough to gather up his few belongings, and then taken him, protesting
vigorously, onto their chartered ship.
He had looked desperately for an opportunity to escape, but none had
presented itself. At the last minute he had dived off the dock, only to be
fished ignominiously out of the mud and dragged aboard.
After that, he had given up any thoughts of escape for a time. Where
could he escape to from a ship? He wasn't that strong a swimmer. Instead, he
had cooperated as best he could, biding his time.
His captors had separated him from the interpreter and made it plain that
they expected him to learn their barbaric tongue, Semmat, they called it. He
had swallowed his revulsion at the thought of speaking anything but proper
Ethsharitic and had done his best to oblige. After all, if he couldn't
understand what was being said around him, he would have little chance of
learning anything useful.
 His language lessons had not covered very much when the ship docked in
Akalla of the Diamond, just ten days after leaving Ethshar of the Spices. The
weather had been hot and clear, and fairly calm, which is why it took ten days
just to cross the Gulf of the East and sail the South Coast. One of the two
immense Semman soldiers, the one who called himself Alder d'Yoon, told Sterren
in a mixture of baby Semmat and sign language that the voyage in the other
direction had taken only four days because the ship had been driven before a
storm much of the way, a very expensive storm, conjured up for that very
purpose, if Sterren understood him correctly.
Alder guessed the total distance between the two ports at less than a
hundred leagues, a figure that surprised Sterren considerably. He had always
thought of the Small Kingdoms as being a very long way off, on the far side of
the ocean, and a hundred leagues across a mere gulf didn't seem that far.
Of course, Sterren was not absolutely certain that he had understood
Alder correctly. He knew he had the numbers straight, because he had learned
them from counting fingers, but he wasn't completely sure of the Semmat terms
for "day" and "league." He wished that he could check with the interpreter,
but Lady Kalira, or rather, Aia Kalira, in Semmat, had expressly forbidden the
man to talk to him in any language, and she was paying enough that the sailor
would not take any chance of losing his job.
Several members of the crew spoke Ethsharitic, but Lady Kalira had paid
each of them to not speak it to Sterren except in emergencies. He was to
communicate in Semmat or not at all.
Too often, it was not at all, leaving him unsure of much of his limited
vocabulary.
Whatever the exact distances, there could be no doubt that on the
afternoon of the tenth day their ship put into port at Akalla, in the shadow
of the grim pile of guano-whitened stone the Semmans called Akalla Karnak.
Sterren thought that karnak probably meant castle, but again he was not quite
sure. He had never seen a castle before, and the forbidding fortification at