"Edward Whittemore - The Jerusalem Quartet 01 - Sinai Tapestry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Whittemore Edward)

The disease that felled him the following day was meningitis, which killed his younger brothers and sisters.
Thus there would be no aunts and uncles in the next generation and a comfortable routine dating from the
reign of Henry II was suddenly shattered.

In its place lay a sickly wasted boy, dying, who made up his mind to do what no Strongbow had ever
done, to enter confusion and not let destiny rest. His first decision was to live and as a result he became
totally deaf. His second decision was to become the world's leading authority on plants, since at that
early age he wasn't fond of people.

Before the attack of meningitis his height had been average. But the revelations that came with the
approach of death, and his subsequent bargaining with fate, brought other changes. By the time he was
fourteen he would be well over six feet tall, and by the age of sixteen he would have reached his full
height of seven feet and seven inches.

Naturally his aunts and uncles were utterly bewildered by these strange events in his twelfth year, yet they
tried to go on living as the Strongbows had always lived. Therefore while he lay recovering in bed, it
being the Christmas season, they gathered in the great banquet hall for the customary pillow match. And
although fearful and disturbed they bravely carried on as usual, resolutely polishing family tradition just as
the first duke had once polished his armor.

While the furniture was being cleared away they picked their teams and playfully jostled one another,
smiling and nodding and politely guffawing and lightly patting a bottom or two, patiently forming queues
and just as patiently reforming them a moment later, stolidly standing one behind the other as they
commented on the rain and tittered hopelessly in agreement.

The hour closed to a few minutes before midnight on Christmas Eve, what should have been the
beginning of twelve companionable days of nuzzling and scrimmaging. But when the playing field was
cleared, precisely when the satin pillow was ceremoniously placed in the middle of the floor and the fun
was ready to begin, a dreadful silence swept through the hall.

They turned. In the doorway stood their gaunt nephew, already an inch or two taller than they
remembered him. Standing straight out in front of him, thick and menacing, was a medieval lance twelve
feet long.

The boy went directly to the middle of the room, skewered the satin pillow and hurled it into the
fireplace, where it burst and blazed briefly. Then in words alternately booming and inaudible, for he
hadn't yet learned to modulate his voice without hearing it, he announced they were all dismissed from his
house and lands forever. Any aunt or uncle found on the premises when the clock struck midnight, he
shouted, would receive the same punishment as the pillow.

There were shrieks and a rush to the door as the future Duke of Dorset, twenty-ninth in his line, calmly
ordered the furniture returned to its place and assumed control of his life.



Young Strongbow's first act was to make an inventory of the artifacts in the manor. With his botanist's
interest in cataloguing he wanted to know exactly what he had inherited, so with a ledger in one hand and
a pen in the other he went from room to room noting everything.

What he found appalled him. The manor was an immense mausoleum containing no less than five hundred