"Sorcerer's Son" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phyllis Eisenstein)

“Don’t you know better than to jump out in front of a running horse?” Cray shouted.

“You could have been killed!”

The figure was cloaked and hooded in spite of the pleasant warmth of the day. It cowered before Cray, falling to its knees in the dust of the road, and in a youthful masculine voice it begged his pardon. “I did not mean to frighten your horse, my lord!

But you are the first person to come along this road today, and I am just a poor starving beggar with no one and nothing to call his own. I implore you, my lord—alms. Alms, to swell your heart and my belly. Good my lord, save me from starvation!” He looked up at last, and his hood fell back, revealing the gaunt and sun-browned face of a lad not much different in age from Cray. A length of filthy rag was tied about his head so as to cover his left eye.

Cray surveyed the youth’s torn and dirty cloak, the worn wrappings on his feet. “Is it food you want, beggar, or money?”

“Food first, good my lord, or I shall not live long enough to reach yonder village. And after… whatever small coins you might be able to spare.” He clasped his hands and raised them toward Cray. “Anything, my lord. A crust of bread. A rind of cheese.

Anything.”

Cray squinted up at the sun. “It may be a little early in the day for a noon meal, but I shall eat anyway. And you shall share it.” He glanced down the road, gestured with one hand. “I see a likely shade tree; shall we sit there?”

The beggar nodded eagerly, and he ran beside Gallant as the horse took its rider to the designated place.

Cray dismounted and tied Gallant’s reins to the tree. Then he drew bread and cheese from his saddlebags, and cold rabbit and a flask of water. He laid them on the shield as on a table, to keep them from the dust of the road.

Cray had seen cripples before, in the webs of his mother’s castle, but in his brief travels away from home, he had never encountered one in the flesh. As he divided the food with his knife and watched his companion wolf that allotted him, he could not help

wondering what lay under the rag bandage. At last, as they licked the last traces of grease from their fingers, he said, “How did it happen?”

The other peered at him through one narrowed brown eye. “How did what happen, my lord?”

“Your eye.”

The beggar touched the rag with one hand, protectively. “I was born this way.”

“You can’t see with it?”

“I can see… a little. But it isn’t pretty. People don’t like to look at it. So I keep it covered.”

“What’s your name?”

“Feldar Sepwin, my lord.”

Cray grinned. “I’m not your lord. I’m not anybody’s lord. My name is Cray Ormoru.”

Sepwin bobbed his head. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.”

“And you needn’t call me sir.”

“I call everyone sir. A beggar must.”

“Ah… or there wouldn’t be any alms.”

“You have it, young sir.”