"Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Free Amazons 04 - Knives" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

feared and hated growled, "So here's where you've been hiding, eh? Filthy slut, I'll teach you to talk like that to your mother. She told me she'd seen you here. You're coming home with me now, and no nonsense about it! Feel this?" Marna felt a knife-edge at her throat. Ruyvil pressed hard; she felt the skin break, and blood trickle down.
"Now will you behave?"
In deadly fear, Marna nodded and the knife moved away from her throat. Ruyvil's hands were rough on her. He said, "Now you come on, without any more fuss. Make a laughing-stock of me, will you, telling tales so your mother can't get decent maids to stay, and com­plaining to a magistrate about me? I tell you, Marna, I'll teach you a lesson if it's the last thing I do! You're coming home where you belong, and people are going to see that I can rule my family and my womenfolk and no damned magistrates butting in! Fine thing, when a man can't handle his own affairs without the government on his back! It's not as if you were any real kin to me, as if I'd done you any harm!" He gave her wrist a vicious twist. "Give me your hands!" She saw a length of rope in them: he would tie her, drag her home—
She wrenched away, screaming. He jerked at her, flung her down. "Marna, I'll kill you for that!" he rasped. She grabbed at her knife, clumsily, in deadly terror. Oh, he would kill her, with that knife—but better that than be dragged home knowing he could do his worst—but sud­denly he had her knife, too, and she cursed her clumsiness.
"You let her alone!" came a scream behind them, and Gwennis swung the heavy mop-handle; Ruyvil's mouth burst open with blood. Swearing, he ran at Gwennis with his sword, and Marna, grabbing up her blade, hardly knowing what she did, thrust herself between them; her Amazon knife, not quite a sword, was braced right against Ruyvil's belly.
"Make one- move," she said, astonished at how loud and firm her voice sounded in the deserted market, "and I'll run this right through you, stepfather!"
He howled in rage. "Put that thing down! What the hell—?"
Gwennis had scrambled to her feet, recovered her own knife. She came and took Ruyvil's sword, saying, "I ought to cut his throat. But we have trouble enough here. I'll tie his hands and he can get loose later—who's to say if the magistrate would believe us? Here, Marna, you tie him, you can make a better knot than I can. He won't get that loose before we're safe in the Guild House. And if he wants to tell how two girls under fif­teen bested him, well, let him talk and be a laughing­stock!"
Ysabet came with the pack-animal and looked at the furious, cursing Ruyvil, his hands tied behind him. She said, "Listen to me, Dom Ruyvil, your stepdaughter, whom you have abused, is being sent to Neskaya Guild House; do you want a public examination by leronis so that everyone in the countryside knows she told the truth?"
He calmed at last and said sheepishly, "No. I will swear—"
"Your oath is not worth a piece of fresh horse dung," said Ysabet, "but if you do not molest us further we will leave you alone, though I would willingly make you incapable of molesting any woman again." She gestured with the knife and Ruyvil flinched and howled, begging, pleading, weeping. Marna wondered why she had ever been afraid of him.
As they went homeward in the dusk, Gwennis said— Ysabet had walked a little ahead with the horse—"If your stepfather was following you, lying in wait for you, why didn't you tell us?"
"I was ashamed," Marna muttered. "So much was said about learning to defend myself, not asking any other for protection—"
"Yet you must protect your sisters, and they must pro­tect you," Gwennis chided gently, an arm around Marna's waist. "That is what the oath is all about, that we swear to care for one another—would you not have pro­tected your mother? You found courage to draw your knife when he menaced me—"
Marna began to weep. She could not protect her mother from Ruyvil; her mother did not want protection, would not appeal even to her sisters. Worse, her mother
had thought so much of Ruyvil that she would not pro­tect her own daughter. For the first time since she had come to the Amazon house she wept and wept, sobbing even after they were inside the Guild House. Gwennis was alarmed at her crying and sent for Reva, who gave her wine, and finally slapped her.
"I can live with what Ruyvil did to me," Marna said, hiccoughing, tears still streaming from her eyes, "and I can defend myself against any man now. But what I cannot bear, is that my mother would not protect me, that she would even let her daughter be misused, rather than lose the man she loved ... that she did not love me enough to quarrel with him...." She cried and cried, clinging to Reva, while the older woman, kinder now, held and comforted her.
"But that is what the Amazon oath is all about," Gwennis repeated. "Any of us will protect you, as your mother should have done; as women must always protect each other. I can't make your mother care for you as she should have done—what's done is done and there's no mending it. But you have an oath-mother now, and many sisters. And you were strong to defend me, if not yourself!"
"You didn't deserve it," Marna sniffed. "I mean, you hadn't done anything. I couldn't let him hurt you!"
Gwennis' arms were around her. "But you hadn't done anything either, and you didn't deserve it, either," she said fiercely, "and if that old wicked man made you think you did, then that's worse than what he did to you in the first place!" She kissed Marna on the cheek. "I'll miss you, sister, if they send you to Thendara for train­ing," she said, "but you'll come back, when you've learned how to defend yourself and how to live with everything you have to live with, breda." Shyly, she took her knife from its sheath. She said, "You defended me when you wouldn't defend yourself. Will you exchange knives with me, Marna?"
After a wide-eyed moment, Marna drew her own knife, and solemnly, they put their knives, each into the other's sheath, then embraced. Marna said, almost crying again, "I do not want to go away! I love you all, and you have been so good to me—"
"But you have sisters everywhere," Reva said gently. "Soon you will take the oath; and then you will be one with us."
Marna put her hand on Gwennis' knife in her sheath. Yes, her sister's knife had been drawn in her defense; now she could draw it in her own. One woman had failed her, but, looking around at her sisters, she knew that no one of them would ever fail her. With amaze­ment, she realized that Dom Ruyvil had not destroyed her; he had driven her into a new life, a real life. What she thought was the end of the world had brought her here.
He had set her free.