"Gordon R. Dickson - Dragon Knight 03 - The Dragon on the Border" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

some fifty to eighty feet above it; by virtue of being built on a little promontory that grew higher toward
the end where the tower was built.

“Castle de Mer, do you think, Brian?” asked Jim.

“I have no doubt of it!” answered Sir Brian merrily, setting his horse into a canter.

The rest did the same; and a few moments later they were riding over the wooden drawbridge that lay
down over a deep but dry ditch, to a large, open doorway with two cresset lamps, made of baskets of
iron bars forged together to hold fuel, burning on either side of the doorway some ten feet off the ground,
to hold back the darkness of the night and the mist.

CHAPTER TWO

“James! Brian-and Dafydd!”

With that shout, a short, luxuriantly mustached figure was running across the hard-packed damp earth
surface of the courtyard toward them; a squarely built young man, with a very large hooked nose. He
wore only a mail shirt above his hose and his hair, flaxen in color like his mustache, was tousled.

“In God’s name!” said Brian, reining up abruptly. “First horses of air; and now dead friends rise again!”

But in a fraction of a second his attitude had changed. He was down off his horse
and-fourteenth-century style- kissing and embracing the smaller man in a crushing hug of his metal-clad
arms.

“Hah!” he half-shouted. “But it is well to see you, Giles! You were near a week dead, with the best
speed we could make when we put your body into the English Channel waters. True, we saw you
change to a seal as you entered the water. But after that-no word. Nothing.”

More cresset lamps were spaced around the interior of the courtyard, but they were too distant, and not
bright enough because of that, to show whether Giles was blushing or not. But on the basis of past
evidence; Jim, who was now also dismounting along with Dafydd, was willing to believe he was.

“A silkie cannot die on land,” said Giles, “but I own it was a sad time after that. I came back here and
my family recognized me, of course, but there was nothing they could do to get me back into man-shape
again. Not until a godly abbot came to Berwick and they invited him down here for a few days. In the
end, my father talked him into blessing me, so that I became a man again. But my father also warned me
then that I will have no second escape from death if I again die as a human on land. After that blessing, I
may turn into a silkie in the water, but I cannot escape my fate ashore!-James!”

Now Giles was hugging and kissing Jim. The links of the smaller man’s chain mail shirt scratched loudly
on Jim’s own armor but no more noticeably than the bristles of Giles’s beard seemed to rasp and spear
into Jim’s cheeks.

The kiss was the ordinary handshake-equivalent of the period-everybody kissed everybody. You would
conclude a purchase or a deal of some kind with a perfect stranger by kissing him or her-and most
people at this time had very bad teeth and therefore rather unsweet breath. You kissed the landlady on
leaving an inn after spending the night there.