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

“Why not go to one of your daughters, then, good sir?” said Cray. “Live with one of them, with your grandchildren about you.”

The old man gazed at Cray with startled eyes. “And leave my home?”

“If you are so lonely…”

“I built this house with my own hands. I cleared my own fields, planted, cultivated, weeded, and when the horse died I pulled the plow myself, and one of the boys walked behind to guide it. My children were born here, and I will be buried here!”

Cray shrugged. “Then you must resign yourself to loneliness, I suppose. You can’t force your children to come back.”

The old man nodded. “I let them go. How could I stop them? Pen them like goats? Tie them to the trees? I let them go. Still… it is a lonely place.” He looked out over his land, which stretched in the shape of a triangle with apex at the hut and base against distant trees. At one time, when it supported a large family, it must have been planted with neat, parallel rows of tall grain and low vegetables. Now all but the portion closest to the hut was overgrown with weeds, and here and there a spindly sapling showed above the scrub, the forest reclaiming its loss. “I am the farthest settler from the town,” he said, his voice and his face suffused with pride in those words. “My father said that bandits would raid us, that wild boars would eat the grain, that wolves would kill my children; but none of that happened. We were too lonely even for those things. Certainly too lonely to guest many travelers.” He smiled at Cray. “But I have tried to keep the road clear for any who might pass. I knew they would be grateful.”

“Indeed we are,” said Cray. “And I hope that the fine soup we will make from this rabbit will be some small recompense for your labors. Have you a pot, good sir? One without porridge in it?”

“A pot? Oh yes. A pot.” He scrambled to his feet and ducked inside the hut to return in a moment with the twin to the porridge container. “This will do, won’t it?”

“Admirably,” said Cray, and he dumped bones and finely cut scraps into it, along with the herbs that he had used to bait his net. The old man added onions and carrots from his fields, salt from a small bag hung just inside the door of his hut, and water from his well, and they set the pot on the fire to boil. Cray was left with boneless rabbit steaks, which he wrapped in a cloth and stowed inside one of his saddle bags; they would be safe there, in case the old man had a dog or two about his place, in case there were weasels in the fields. Later, when the soup was done, Cray would broil the meat over open flames, and all three of them would share the evening meal.

When he turned back to the fire, the old man still sat there, stirring it and musing on the past, and Sepwin sat happily enough beside him, a green twig between his teeth. Cray settled beside them, lying down on his back on the bare, fire-warmed earth, arms behind his head, and he looked up at the sky, where the clouds had finally cleared away without loosing any rain at all.

“In twenty years,” the old man was saying, “I have had only four guests. Others have passed on the road and, I suppose, found my hut too poor to stop at; one even waved to me as he galloped by. He bore a blue standard in his hand, and I always wondered where he came from, where he was going in such a hurry.” He nodded, more to himself than to Cray or Sepwin. “Yes, some few have passed, but only four have stopped. You are two.”

He counted them off on the index and middle finger of his left hand. “And the other two

—they were here together, too, but not together, not companions like you. The one came first. He was a pleasant young fellow. My wife liked him. She was alive then, and some of the children were still here, the three younger ones, I think. She wanted to know if I thought him handsome, I remember. Oh, quite handsome, quite. And he chopped enough wood to last us the rest of the year. The other came later. I never saw his face at all—he kept his visor down, just shouted a challenge to the first. They fought on the road, right out in front of the hut. I never found out exactly what it was they fought about. The second one—he rode away right after it was finished, didn’t say another word. I had to bury the other one myself.”

“They were knights?” asked Cray.

“They wore armor. I suppose they were knights. It was some private feud. I kept the children away after the fighting began, though they wanted to watch. Two wild men they were, with their swords in their hands, and I thought it would be easy for a watcher to be killed.”

“Did they use only swords?”

“Yes, swords. And shields. And a mighty racket they made, too, bashing metal against metal. The loser’s sword was all notched, and the edges of his shield were bent. Every time I look at them, I wonder how a man’s arms can stand all that battering.”

“You have the shield and sword of the man who was killed?”

“Oh, yes, yes.” The old man bobbed his head. “I had his horse, too, to pull my plow until it died. The winner, he just rode off, never saying a word, leaving the dead body in the middle of the road. The bloodstains were there until the next rain.”

Cray frowned. “He should have taken the shield, at least, to send to his opponent’s lord.

That would have been only courtesy. They did seem to know each other, did they not?”

“They knew each other well, I thought. Certainly, there was no time for them to argue before they met here and the fight began.”

“It was wrong to leave the arms behind them. And wrong not to bury the body as well.”

“Right or wrong,” said the old man, “I would not have stopped him to demand either. He was a big man on a big horse, and his armor was black as pitch, with no device, without a scratch upon it. He had never lost a fight, I knew that. I let him go, and I thanked good fortune that he had no quarrel with me. My wife cried when we buried the other. She said he was too young to die.” He shrugged, “Well, and so was she, and my eldest son.

We all die, sooner or later. I think on that when I look on their graves, and I wonder why I have been spared so long. A grave is an excellent thing, to give a man pause in a long day, to remind him to be grateful for the little life given him. Don’t you think so?”