"Clayton Emery - Robin Hood and the Pirates" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

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Jaffa was blocky houses and blotches of gardens on
hills surrounding a tiny harbor that held only fishing
vessels and small coasters, and one lone merchant
vessel lying by the long stone wharf. It was autumn,
a time of storms, late in the shipping season. Yet
the sky overhead remained molten brass, and the
meager sea breeze did little to dampen the heat
reflected from the dusty streets and blinding
oyster-white buildings.
The two men laid out pennies and bought flat bread,
white goat cheese, and figs, and washed it down
with water from a public fountain. Then they joined
the lazy bustle of the dockside, added themselves to
the queue before the table at the head of the
gangplank. Cargo in chests and bales and sacks
were heaped all around the ship's gangplank, and
mule carts came and went and stacked more and
more produce to go into the hold of the single small
ship.
At the table were a scribe and the burly Greek
captain and a quartet of German knights, all in black
like vultures, who dickered with the captain in
guttural French. As near as Robin could follow, they
wanted the captain to avoid putting in to Cyprus,
where the air was bad for Germans. The captain
begged and whined and wrung his hands, and finally
agreed to only land when the wind was offshore,
and to withdraw at other times. Once that was
settled, they argued about who would pay the
landing dues, then the tolls, then the port charges,
and so on and on. The final price they agreed upon
made Robin gasp.
"That bastard!" the outlaw breathed to Little John.
"Forty ducats a man!"
Little John watched a porter with a crate of chickens
on his shoulder trot down the gangplank. "That
include food?"
"Is that all you ever think about, eating?"
"Only when I'm hungry."
Robin Hood stepped aside as sailors hoisted bales of
cotton off a cart and tromped down the gangplank.
"Well, we're sunk, clean through the bottom of my
purse. I ain't got it. We'll have to --"
Someone was fluttering her eyelashes over her
shoulder at Robin. In front of him stood a woman
not twenty, dark-haired and winsome, in a red robe
trimmed with silver fox tails. Beside her was an old
man, probably her father. The old man noticed the
flirting and swung around, scrawny hand on her