"David Weber - Empire of Man 02 - March to the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

equate to 'cowardly.' " He gestured at the mounded bodies of the flar-ke. "Capetoads," he snorted.
"What?" Pahner asked. There were a million things to do, but at the moment they were getting done.
He was, for once, going to just let the camp run.
"They look like horned toads, but they're nasty as Cape buffalo." Roger shrugged. "Capetoads."
"Works for me," Pahner agreed. He sniffed at the smells coming from the cooking area. "And it
appears that we're about to find out what they taste like."
"One guess," Dobrescu said, with a grunt of effort as he shoved himself to his feet.
As it turned out, they tasted very much like chicken.




CHAPTER TWO
"Now that's something you don't see every day," Julian said tiredly.
"I guess you do around here," Despreaux replied.
The beast looked like nothing so much as a bipedal dinosaur. A large bipedal dinosaur, with short
forelimbs and extremely atrophied mid limbs . . . and a rider.
"Cool," Kyrou said. "Horse-ostriches."
The rider reined in in front of the company, said something in a loud voice, and raised a hand for
them to stop. The reins, which led to a bridle arrangement much like that for a horse, were held with the
false-hands, leaving the upper hands available for things like imperious gestures . . . or weapons, and
Kosutic walked forward, holding up her own open hands.
"Ms. O'Casey to the front, please," she called over the company frequency. "I can't get a bit of what
this guy is saying."
"On my way," the academic's voice replied, and Kosutic returned her attention to the mounted
Mardukan. He was clearly a guardsman of some sort, for he was heavily armed and armored. Not that
the arms and armor bore any resemblance at all to the equipment in common use on the far side of the
mountains. He also looked like a tough customer who wasn't entirely pleased to see them, and the
sergeant major clasped her hands before her in the nearest approximation to a Mardukan gesture of
polite greeting a human's mere two arms could achieve.
"Our interpreter is on her way," the Marine said pleasantly in the trade tongue commonly used
throughout the Hadur. There was no way in the world that the local was going to understand her, of
course, but she hoped the tone and body language would get through, at least.
It seemed to work, for the guardsman gave her a Mardukan nod, lowered his raised hand, and
settled back to wait. He still didn't seem overjoyed by her company, but his own body language indicated
that he was willing to be patient . . . up to a point, at least.
The sergeant major took advantage of the delay to study her surroundings. She rather suspected that
the locals had known they were coming at least a little in advance, for the mounted soldier had
intercepted them just as they emerged from the dense tree cover higher up the mountain on the edge of
their destination's cultivated fields.
The peasants tending those fields had looked up at the commotion, turning from their drudgery for a
bit of distraction. They wore dark colored robes that covered them from head to foot. The rough, dark
cloth was wet in patches, and as they stopped, several unstoppered water bags and wet themselves
down. It was obvious how the locals dealt with the, for humans, pleasant dryness of the plateau.
The plants they were tending were thoroughly unfamiliar, howeverтАФsome sort of low climbers,
staked up on pole-and-string arbors. They were also in flower, and the heavy scent of the millions of
flowers drifted across the company like a blanket.
In addition to their odd dress and plants, the locals had the first beasts of burdenтАФother than flar-ta
тАФthe humans had seen in their entire time on Marduk. The elephant-sized packbeasts were unsuited to
any sort of agricultural use, but some of the local peasants were plowing one of the nearby fields, and