"Sara Douglass - The Axis Trilogy 1 - BattleAxe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

you; Let not your Lover's pain distract For this will mean your death; •
Destroyer's might lies in his hate Yet you must never follow; Forgiveness is the
thing assured To save Tencendor's soul.




Prologue
The woman struggled through the knee-deep snow, the bundle of dead wood
she had tied to her back almost as great a burden as the weight of the child she
carried in her belly. Her breath rasped in her throat before frosting heavily in the
bitterly cold southerly wind. She was short and strong, her legs and shoulders
finely muscled by twenty-eight years of hard-won survival in her harsh
homeland. But she had always had the help and company of her people to aid
her. Now she was alone, and this, her third child, she would have to bear
without assistance.
This would be her last trip across the valley. The severe winter storms of the
past few weeks had kept her iced into her shelter so that her supply of the
precious hot-burning Timewood was almost exhausted; if she did not have
enough wood and dry stores remaining for her confinement, then she would die
and her child would die with her. Only in the past day had the weather broken
sufficiently to allow her to struggle through the snow to reach the Timewood
trees. Now the wind was growing harsher and the snow heavier and she knew
she had only a short time to reach her shelter. The knowledge that once the
baby was born she would not be able to travel far from her shelter drove her on.
Although her current solitude was a path she had chosen freely, worry ate at
her bones.
And worry about her child also gnawed at her. Her previous two pregnancies
had been uncomfortable, especially in the final weeks, but she had borne those
children with little fuss. Her body had recuperated quickly and had healed cleanly
each time. With this child she feared her labour more than the lonely winter
ahead. It was too large, too . . . angry. Sometimes at night when she was trying
to sleep it twisted and beat at the sides of her womb with such frantic fists and
heels that she moaned in pain, rocking herself from side to side in a futile bid to
escape its rage.
She paused briefly, adjusting the burden of wood on her back, wishing she
could ease the load of the child as easily. Last night it had shifted down into the
pit of her belly, seeking the birth canal. The birth was close. Perhaps tonight,
perhaps tomorrow. She could feel the bones of her pelvis grating apart with the
pressure of the child's head each time she took a step, making it hard to walk.
She squinted through the snow to the thick line of conifers about three
hundred paces ahead. She had done her best with her camp. It was sheltered
well behind the tree line in the lee of a rocky hill that, jutting above the peaks of
the trees, was the first in a long range of hills leading into the distant Icescarp
Alps. Well before her pregnancy had begun to show, she'd slipped away from her
friends and family and travelled the Avarinheim to reach this lonely spot far to
the north of her usual forest home. From the first of the autumn months,
DeadLeaf-month, she had occupied her days with gathering and storing as many
berries, nuts and seeds as she could. As hard as she searched, however, she had
found only small amounts of malfari, the sweet fibrous tubers that provided her