"Duncan, Dave - Seventh Sword - 03 - Destiny Of The Sword" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Dave)

Nnanji snickered.
"My lord..." Arganari said and stopped. His mentor rumbled wamingly at him.
"You want to know where I got it," Wallie said, replacing the priceless blade in his scabbard. He shrugged. "It is a reasonable question. I was given it by a god." He drank some beer.
The visitors were understandably astounded.
"He also gave me this sapphire hairclip and told me I had a task for the Goddess."
Now Polini understood and was impressed. "Then you are to be leader of the tryst, my lord!"
"Perhaps I am," Wallie said. "If so, then She is in no hurry to get me there, which may be where you come in." He looked to Nnanji, who nodded thoughtfully.
"Me? Us?"
"I am wondering if we were meant to meet, Master Polini. Stranger things can happen—indeed they happen to me all the time. It is curious that you chose this ship, and even more curious that you and your prote"g6 should be familiar with one
of the other seven swords of Chioxin. A tryst might be good training for a swordsman prince. After all, a novice will not be expected to do any fighting, so he will be in no great danger."
For the first time, the youngster showed some normal boyish excitement. He swung around to his mentor to see what he thought.
Polini rose disapprovingly. "You may well be right, my lord. I hope that you are. But I have already sworn my oath and I must attempt to return my prot6g6 to Plo. If I am wrong, then I am sure that we shall meet again—in Casr."
The light died in the boy's eyes, and he stood up dutifully. Princes learned more than flowery speeches, and Firsts did not argue. Then he turned and looked up at Nnanji.
"Adept," he said, his voice now curiously flat, "was it truly you who led the wagon charge against the sorcerers in Ov?"
Nnanji grinned. "We skinned them! Fourteen dead sorcerers." He glanced regretfully at Wallie, who had spared an easy fifteenth.
The boy reached up and unfastened his ponytail. "I shall not likely be going to the tryst, adept," he said. "Lord Shonsu has a hairclip that was given him by a god, so he will not mind. This one belonged to my ancestor, and he wore it on the tryst of Xo. Will you take it for me and wear it against the evildoers?" He held out the silver clip.
"Novice!" Polini barked. "That clip has been in your family for centuries! Your father would not approve of your giving it away to a stranger. I forbid this!"
"Not a stranger, mentor, a hero."
"I think he is right, novice," Wallie said gently.
That settled the matter, of course, but Nnanji, immensely flattered at being called a hero, swallowed hard and said that he also agreed. Reluctantly Arganari replaced the clip, looking very juvenile between the three tall men.
"We thank you for your hospitality, my lord," Polini said formally. "I wish now to withdraw, with your permission, and seek a vessel. Probably a smaller would be more suitable. With no sailor-swordsmen Sixths!" he added, his smile openly skeptical.
Puzzled and vaguely worried, Wallie led the visitors back to
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the top of the gangplank, arriving just as Lae came aboard, closely followed by Jja. Jja had discarded the riverfolk bikini sashes she normally wore on the ship in favor of a conventional slave's black wrap. But the perfection of her figure could triumph over any costume, and her face was the stuff of legends. Wallie smiled her a welcome. He put an arm around her and unthinkingly proceeded to commit a major social blunder. Accustomed over many weeks now to the informality of ship life, he had forgotten the stilted formality of land-based culture in the World.
"Jja, my darling," he said, "here are visitors from your hometown, Master Polini and his Highness Novice Arganari."
The swordsmen stared aghast at the slavestripe on the woman's face. Jja was momentarily paralyzed, also. There was no ritual for presenting slaves, as Wallie should have remembered.
Then Jja fell to her knees and pressed her forehead to the deck. Wallie bit his lip in fury at his own stupidity. Polini was totally at a loss for words. It was young Arganari who reacted first. He stepped forward and raised her.
"Truly I see how Plo earned its reputation for beautiful women," he said in his singsong, childish voice. "If it did not have it before, then it would now."
That was a courtly speech.
ttt
Master Polini headed down the plank with his prot6g6 at his heels. He was probably relieved to escape from the insanity of Sapphire, with its incomprehensible Seventh and its rabid captain. If he breathed a prayer of thanks, then he breathed too soon, for another outrage was in store for him—on reaching the dock he came face-to-face with the returning Brota.
Female swordsmen were a heresy to landlubbers. Fat swordsmen were intolerable. Swordsmen who still bore their blades in middle age were contemptible. Brota was all of those, voluminous in her red robe, her ponytail streaked with gray, and a sword
on her back. Wallie saw the encounter and chuckled. Apparently there was something in Polini's face that annoyed her, for she fixed him with her piggy eye and accosted him squarely. Then she drew and made the salute to an equal. With obvious reluctance, he responded. They exchanged a few words, then Polini set off along the road with furiously huge strides, his diminutive protegЈ almost trotting to keep up with him. Brota rolled up the plank wearing a satisfied smirk. As a water-rat swordsman she enjoyed baiting the landlubber variety almost as much as her sailor son did.
Polini had probably not even noticed Mata in the background, although she was still a fine-looking woman in her brown bra sash and breechclout. Wallie wondered what Polini would have said had he been told that she, a sailor of the third rank, a mother of four children, could probably give him a fair match with foil or sword.
Wallie had apologized to Jja, cursed himself several times for his stupidity, and then had to tell the beginning of the story to Nnanji, who had nodded in satisfaction and gone off with his head high, probably repeating "hero" to himself. A prince had said it—intoxicating stuff for the son of a rugmaker.
Brota rolled over to Wallie and scowled up at him under her curiously bushy white brows. "I suppose you are in haste to leave now, my lord?"
Wallie shrugged. "Not especially. If the Goddess is in a hurry, then She can speed our passage as She pleases. You found no trader
"Pah! Their prices are outrageous," she said.
Katanji had commented on the prices in the brothel. Katanji was a very astute young man in money matters. Now Wallie wondered if a tryst would create a local inflation. A few hundred active young men could certainly drive up the price of food—and women—in Casr, but he would not have thought mat the effect would have reached so far as Tau.
That raised a whole new series of problems. Who was going to pay for this tryst? Probably most of the men arriving would be free swords. They would be penniless, and Casr would be in trouble. They would expect tree shelter and board—and women. The economy of the World was a primitive, fragile thing. The
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demigod had given WalUe a fortune in sapphires and called it "expenses." Perhaps that had been another hint that he was expected to be leader of the tryst. Why, then, was he not being taken to it?
He looked across the dock road to the nearest warehouse. "The Goddess has guided you often in the past to the most profitable cargo, mistress," he suggested. "What do they offer over there?"
"Ox hides!" Brota snorted. "Nasty things! I don't want my ship full of smelly hides!"