Dragonspell: The Southern Sea. Katharine Kerr

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ‘He couldn’t take the strain right now, truly. How goes the other hunt?’

      ‘For our murdering troublemaker? Very badly indeed. For a while there I thought I was on his trail, but he’s disappeared. The stinking gall of him, trying to attack the child! If I get my claws into him, I’ll tear him limb from limb, I swear it.’

      ‘He doubtless knows it, too. Once he realized that you were looking for him, he probably ran off somewhere to hide.’ Elaeno considered the problem for a moment. ‘Well, maybe if he’s properly scared, he’ll leave us alone.’

      ‘Always full of hope and raw optimism, aren’t you? No doubt he’ll lie quiet for a while, but he’ll come back. His kind always does, like a witch’s curse.’

      After being in attendance on the King for two long months, both pleading his cousin Rhodry’s cause and tending to business of his own, Blaen, Gwerbret Cwm Pecl, was profoundly relieved to ride home to his own city of Dun Hiraedd. With the fall harvest his taxes were coming in, and he spent a pleasurable pair of days playing the role of the rough country lord, standing round his ward with the chamberlain and bailiffs and counting up the pigs and chickens, cheeses and barrels of apples, sacks of flour (both white and barley,) tuns of mead and ale, as well as the occasional hard coin that was his due. He had a private word or a jest for every man who came to deliver his taxes, whether he was a lord’s chamberlain riding ahead of a pair of laden ox-carts or a local farmer carrying a wicker cage of rabbits on his back and a sack of flour in his arms.

      Yet soon enough he left the taxes to his highly efficient staff and decided instead to make a small progress among his vassals. There were many lords that he hadn’t seen since the spring at the great feast of Beltane, and he liked to keep a personal eye on potential squabblers and grumblers. He had another reason, as well: to look for some likely parcel of land, at least ten farmsteads’ worth, to bestow on Rhodry’s woman, Gilyan, Cullyn of Cerrmor’s daughter, along with letters patent of nobility. Although, with a good half of his demesne wilderness, finding the land would be easy, enticing the free farmers to work it was another matter indeed. What counted now, though, was that Jill have land and a title of her own; the income would be superfluous once she was married to Rhodry and he’d been installed in Aberwyn.

      Since his wife, Canyffa, was pregnant, Blaen left her behind to rule dun and rhan in his stead and took only some twenty-five men of his warband along as an honour guard. They rode north first, stopping at Cae Labradd and the dun of the tieryn, Riderrc. To celebrate the gwerbret’s visit there was a great feast one night, and a hunting party the next day, but on the third day Blaen told the tieryn that he wanted merely to ride around the rhan on his own. With only five men for an escort he set out in mid-morning, but rather than viewing the tieryn’s fields and woods, he rode straight for town.

      Just at the outskirts of Cae Labradd, on the banks of a tributary that flowed into the Canaver a few miles on, stood a brewery that was known as the best in all Cwm Pecl. Set behind a low, grassy earthenwork wall was a cluster of round buildings, freshly white-washed and neatly thatched, the brewer’s living quarters, the malt house, the drying house, the brewing house proper, the storage sheds and, off to one side, the pigsty and the cow barn. When Blaen turned off the road and led his men toward the brewery, they all cheered him, quite spontaneously and sincerely.

      Over the door of the main house hung a rough broom of birch twigs, scented with strong ale, a sign that customers could buy a tankard or a tun as it suited them. When Blaen and his men dismounted, a stout grey-haired woman with a long white apron over her blue dress hurried out and curtsied.

      ‘Oh my, oh my, it’s the gwerbret himself! Veddyn, get out here! It’s the gwerbret and his men! Oh my, oh my! Your Grace, such a great honour. Oh you must try some of our new dark and there’s a cask of bitter, too. Oh my, oh my!’

      ‘Don’t dither, woman! Gods! You’ll drive his grace daft.’ Tall and lean, hawk-nosed and perfectly bald, Veddyn strolled out and made Blaen a perfunctory bow. ‘Honoured, Your Grace. What brings you to us?’

      ‘Thirst, mostly, good Veddyn. Do you have tankards enough for me and mine?’

      ‘It’d be a poor brewery that couldn’t serve six travellers, Your Grace. Just you all tie up those horses and come inside.’

      Blaen handed his captain a handful of silver to pay for the ale, ushered his men inside, then lingered briefly in the yard with Twdilla while Veddyn followed them in. Once they were alone she dropped her dithery ways.

      ‘I take it that Your Grace is here for news?’

      ‘That, and to look in on Camdel, poor lad. Is he any better?’

      ‘Quite a bit, actually, but he’ll never be right in the head again after what they did to him.’ She crossed her fingers in the sign of warding against witchcraft. ‘He’s mucking out the cow barn at the moment, so I’ll wager Your Grace doesn’t want …’

      ‘By the gods, it doesn’t matter to me what he smells like. Let’s stroll over, shall we?’

      As it turned out, they found Camdel sitting behind the cow barn on an old stump and eating his lunch, a chunk of bread and slices of yellow cheese laid out neatly on an old linen napkin. When he saw Blaen he got up and bowed with a sweeping courtly gesture that went ill with his dirty shirt and brown brigga, but although his eyes betrayed a flicker of recognition, he didn’t truly remember Blaen and had to be told his name. He was, however, physically healthy again and even somewhat happy, smiling as he spoke of his quiet life at the brewery. Blaen was well-pleased. The last time he’d seen the man, Camdel had been a quivering shrieking wreck, stick-thin and utterly mad from the tortures of those who followed the dark dweomer.

      And now, or so Blaen had been told, his beloved cousin was in the hands of those same evil men. Although he generally could keep the thought at bay, at times, when he least expected it, when he was talking with some vassal or merely walking down a corridor or looking idly from a window, the memory would rise up like an assassin and stab him: Rhodry could be suffering like Camdel did. With the thought came a breathless rage, a gasp for air that seared his chest and made him swear yet one more time a vengeance vow: if these evil magicians had made his cousin suffer for so much as the length of a cock-crow, then nothing on earth, not king nor dweomer, would stop him from raising an army and sweeping down on Bardek like a flock of eagles, even if he had to bankrupt his rhan and call in every honour-debt and alliance anyone had ever owed him. Since he made the vow to his gods as well as to the honour of his clan, it was no idle boast.

      He would have been surprised to know that the Dark Brotherhoods knew of his rage but pleased to learn that they feared it.

      The central plateau and especially the hill country of southern Surtinna, the biggest island of the Bardekian archipelago, was at that time sparsely populated, a vast sweep of rolling downs descending from the knife-edge of a young mountain range. Nominally the downs came under the jurisdiction of the archons of Pastedion and Vardeth, who parcelled out land-grants to their supporters at whim, since the hawks and field-mice who lived there never bothered to argue about it. The land-owners in turn rented out parcels for farms or cattle ranches or even, in a few rare cases, for summer homes and country retreats for the rich. Although the income from the grants was sparse, the prestige was enormous. As a further benefit, the archons and the laws were far, far away, so that a grant holder could live as he pleased, rather like a Deverry lord.

      Up in the heart of the hill country, right under the looming, pine-black mountains, lay one particular estate that had been bought and built some seventy years earlier by a retired civil servant named Tondalo. Although it received rents from some free-born cattle ranchers, its own slaves raised enough food and СКАЧАТЬ