A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Джордж Р. Р. Мартин

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ her face and the way her fingers made the dragon snap and slither at the end of its strings. He would have tossed the girl a copper if he’d had one to spare, but just now he needed every coin.

      There were armorers amongst the merchants, as he had hoped. A Tyroshi with a forked blue beard was selling ornate helms, gorgeous fantastical things wrought in the shapes of birds and beasts and chased with gold and silver. Elsewhere he found a swordmaker hawking cheap steel blades, and another whose work was much finer, but it was not a sword he lacked.

      The man he needed was all the way down at the end of the row, a shirt of fine chain mail and a pair of lobstered steel gauntlets displayed on the table before him. Dunk inspected them closely. “You do good work,” he said.

      “None better.” A stumpy man, the smith was no more than five feet tall, yet wide as Dunk about the chest and arms. He had a black beard, huge hands, and no trace of humility.

      “I need armor for the tourney,” Dunk told him. “A suit of good mail, with gorget, greaves, and greathelm.” The old man’s halfhelm would fit his head, but he wanted more protection for his face than a nasal bar alone could provide.

      The armorer looked him up and down. “You’re a big one, but I’ve armored bigger.” He came out from behind the table. “Kneel, I want to measure those shoulders. Aye, and that thick neck o’ yours.” Dunk knelt. The armorer laid a length of knotted rawhide along his shoulders, grunted, slipped it about his throat, grunted again. “Lift your arm. No, the right.” He grunted a third time. “Now you can stand.” The inside of a leg, the thickness of his calf, and the size of his waist elicited further grunts. “I have some pieces in me wagon that might do for you,” the man said when he was done. “Nothing prettied up with gold or silver, mind you, just good steel, strong and plain. I make helms that look like helms, not winged pigs and queer foreign fruits, but mine will serve you better if you take a lance in the face.”

      “That’s all I want,” said Dunk. “How much?”

      “Eight hundred stags, for I’m feeling kindly.”

      “Eight hundred?” It was more than he had expected. “I … I could trade you some old armor, made for a smaller man … a halfhelm, a mail hauberk …”

      “Steely Pate sells only his own work,” the man declared, “but it might be I could make use of the metal. If it’s not too rusted, I’ll take it and armor you for six hundred.”

      Dunk could beseech Pate to give him the armor on trust, but he knew what sort of answer that request would likely get. He had traveled with the old man long enough to learn that merchants were notoriously mistrustful of hedge knights, some of whom were little better than robbers. “I’ll give you two silvers now, and the armor and the rest of the coin on the morrow.”

      The armorer studied him a moment. “Two silvers buys you a day. After that, I sell me work to the next man.”

      Dunk scooped the stags out of his pouch and placed them in the armorer’s callused hand. “You’ll get it all. I mean to be a champion here.”

      “Do you?” Pate bit one of the coins. “And these others, I suppose they all came just to cheer you on?”

      The moon was well up by the time he turned his steps back toward his elm. Behind him, Ashford Meadow was ablaze with torchlight. The sounds of song and laughter drifted across the grass, but his own mood was somber. He could think of only one way to raise the coin for his armor. And if he should be defeated … “One victory is all I need,” he muttered aloud. “That’s not so much to hope for.”

      Even so, the old man would never have hoped for it. Ser Arlan had not ridden a tilt since the day he had been unhorsed by the Prince of Dragonstone in a tourney at Storm’s End, many years before. “It is not every man who can boast that he broke seven lances against the finest knight in the Seven Kingdoms,” he would say. “I could never hope to do better, so why should I try?”

      Dunk had suspected that Ser Arlan’s age had more to do with it than the Prince of Dragonstone did, but he never dared say as much. The old man had his pride, even at the last. I am quick and strong, he always said so, what was true for him need not be true for me, he told himself stubbornly.

      He was moving through a patch of weed, chewing over his chances in his head, when he saw the flicker of firelight through the bushes. What is this? Dunk did not stop to think. Suddenly his sword was in his hand and he was crashing through the grass.

      He burst out roaring and cursing, only to jerk to a sudden halt at the sight of the boy beside the campfire. “You!” He lowered the sword. “What are you doing here?”

      “Cooking a fish,” said the bald boy. “Do you want some?”

      “I meant, how did you get here? Did you steal a horse?”

      “I rode in the back of a cart, with a man who was bringing some lambs to the castle for my lord of Ashford’s table.”

      “Well, you’d best see if he’s gone yet, or find another cart. I won’t have you here.”

      “You can’t make me go,” the boy said, impertinent. “I’d had enough of that inn.”

      “I’ll have no more insolence from you,” Dunk warned. “I should throw you over my horse right now and take you home.”

      “You’d need to ride all the way to King’s Landing,” said the boy. “You’d miss the tourney.”

      King’s Landing. For a moment Dunk wondered if he was being mocked, but the boy had no way of knowing that he had been born in King’s Landing as well. Another wretch from Flea Bottom, like as not, and who can blame him for wanting out of that place?

      He felt foolish standing there with sword in hand over an eight-year-old orphan. He sheathed it, glowering so the boy would see that he would suffer no nonsense. I ought to give him a good beating at the least, he thought, but the child looked so pitiful he could not bring himself to hit him. He glanced around the camp. The fire was burning merrily within a neat circle of rocks. The horses had been brushed, and clothes were hanging from the elm, drying above the flames. “What are those doing there?”

      “I washed them,” the boy said. “And I groomed the horses, made the fire, and caught this fish. I would have raised your pavilion, but I couldn’t find one.”

      “There’s my pavilion.” Dunk swept a hand above his head, at the branches of the tall elm that loomed above them.

      “That’s a tree,” the boy said, unimpressed.

      “It’s all the pavilion a true knight needs. I would sooner sleep under the stars than in some smoky tent.”

      “What if it rains?”

      “The tree will shelter me.”

      “Trees leak.”

      Dunk laughed. “So they do. Well, if truth be told, I lack the coin for a pavilion. And you’d best turn that fish, or it will be burned on the bottom and raw on the top. You’d never make a kitchen boy.”

      “I would if I wanted,” the boy said, but he turned the fish.

      “What happened to your hair?” Dunk asked СКАЧАТЬ