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

“I don’t think we will,” replied Cray. “I haven’t seen a tree in a good while, except for a couple growing right out of the water, and I won’t spend my night bailing out the tent, thank you.”

“What will we do then?”

“We don’t need a tree, though it would make things simpler.” He tossed the last of the duck bones aside, stood up, and walked over to where Gallant, tethered to a low bush, was peacefully cropping the coarse swamp grass. The animal nickered softly at his approach, and he stroked its neck and face, crooning softly. Then he dipped into one of the saddlebags and found a kerchief. He folded it into a bandage and tied it over Gallant’s face as a blindfold. “Use that eye patch that you don’t need here in the swamp,” he said to Sepwin, “and do as I am doing to your own mount.”

Sepwin obeyed, and while he stood by his blindfolded horse, he watched Cray climb into his own saddle and lean forward, stretching both arms out over Gallant’s head.

Spiders crept from his sleeves then and spun their strands, anchoring at their master’s limbs and leaping to the ground on either side of Gallant’s unseeing eyes, playing thread from their descending bodies. Soon two parallel sets of ribbons had formed from Cray’s arms, and the spiders had begun to climb back up, swiftly weaving cross strands till the webwork was nigh opaque. Cray peeled the web from himself then, letting it settle upon Gallant’s head, and he eased backward in the saddle. The spiders followed his

movements, spinning from the saddle now and returning to his arms when sheets of webbing hung from that. Cray guided the final webwork to fall upon his horse’s rump and then he slipped off over the tail. Gallant stood still, covered with a close-fitting tent of spidersilk.

“Your horse’s turn now,” said Cray, and he mounted that animal.

“Must you sit there and let them spin all over you?” asked Sepwin. “Can’t they just spin directly on the horses themselves, as they did on the inside of last night’s shelter?”

Cray nodded. “They could. But horses are skittish beasts. How would you like to feel a score of spiders crawling over your skin?”

Sepwin backed off. “No. No.” He watched the tent-making process repeated on his own mount, and after a time he said, “You’re not going to do the same thing for the two of us, are you?”

“I could,” said Cray, “but somehow I don’t think you’d care to spend the night quite so closely draped in spiderwebs. The horses won’t mind—to them the webs are just

blankets, but to you…” He smiled. “Well, the webs are just blankets, you know.”

“Isn’t there some other way?”

“Don’t worry.”

When he was done with Sepwin’s horse, Cray took up his sword and shield, which he had removed from Gallant’s saddle before the web-making. He thrust the sword point-first into the ground, and a body’s length away, he hammered the shield into the ground, also point-first. The ground was soft enough to yield to them but hard enough that they remained upright, and he braced them with stones to insure that they would not tip over.

Then he marked a perimeter about them with other stones and set his spiders free upon that frame. Soon they had fashioned a small tent, with the sword and shield as its supports and the perimeter stones anchoring their silk to the ground. The tent was large enough for two people to crawl inside and lie down.

“Not quite as roomy as last night,” said Cray, “but at least we won’t have to share it with the horses.”

“You’re sure they’ll be all right?” Sepwin asked. “Those webs are so close-fitting…

might not an insect be able to bite through to flesh without actually passing through the weave?”

“Not those webs. And now I think we should enter our own armor; I can hear the

buzzing already.”

Sepwin clutched at his own arms and looked about. “I wonder how big they are.”

“I don’t think I care to find out. Come on.”

In the morning, Sepwin peered at the map. “How much farther does this swamp go on?”

Cray traced the road with one finger. “I think we’re about here now, which means another day or two. The end of the swamp isn’t clearly marked, but there’s a town over here, and surely that’s beyond the swamp.”