"Steve White - The Disinherited 03 - Debt of Ages" - читать интересную книгу автора (White Steve)

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Debt of Ages by Steve White
PROLOGUE - 491 A.D.2
The Restorer was dying.

I knew him for the Restorer at the moment I first met him, thought
Sidonius Apollinaris, known to the world these past eight years as His
Holiness Gaius II, keeper of the keys of Saint Peter.

Behind him stood most of the Consistory, filling the incense-heavy air
with that sense of numb disbelief with which the entire Sacred Palace, the
entire City of Constantine around it, and the whole of Rome's reunified
and expanded empire beyond that awaited the passing of him who had
brought it all back from the edge of the abyss. But Sidonius was aware of
none of the overdressed dignitaries with whom he shared the Imperial
bedchamber. He stood over the bed and looked down into his old friends
face, worn down by war, the cares of empire and sixty-four winters, as well
as by the sickness that was killing him.

The dark eyes fluttered open, glittering with recognition as much as
with fever. "Sidonius," he said in a dry whisper to which he still managed
to give a kind of firmness.

"Yes, Augustus, I am here."

The shockingly aged face formed the famous grin whose boyishness had
never seemed incongruous and still didn't.

"There you go again, Sidonius! I never persuaded you to stop
addressing me as 'Riothamus' even though I kept telling you we Britons
only used the title on formal occasions. And after that it's always been
'Augustus'! Will you let me go to my grave still refusing to call me by my
name, at least in private?"
 All at once, Sidonius was no longer in the ornate room that the doctors
insisted on keeping so stifling. He was on a beach at the mouth of the
Loire twenty-two years before, standing in the chill salt wind with the
menтАФall dead now, besides himтАФwho had awaited the arrival of the High
King of the Britons whose army was the Western Empires last hope
against the Visigoths.

I can still see the afternoon sun blazing forth through the first break
in that day's overcast as he stepped from the boat, silhouetting him
against the divine fire. But that fire burned even more strongly within