"Jones, J V - Sword Of Shadows 02 - A Fortress Of Gray Ice V2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones J. V)

Thickheaded from the oolak, Raif felt his thoughts begin to float away from him. It was difficult to concentrate in the smoky haze of the chamber, increasingly harder to discern what was important from what didn’t matter at all. Unable to fight the lassitude, Raif raised his cup to his lips and drank.
As he swallowed the final drop he became aware of Ash’s gaze upon him. A single tear shivered in the corner of her eye. A distant warning sounded, a dim light in the murkiness that filled his head. Ash’s features were perfectly controlled, her breathing even. Yet when Raif’s gaze dropped to the cup she held, he saw tiny ripples disrupting the surface of the oolak. Quietly, almost imperceptibly, Ash March was shaking.
He should have acted. The instinct was there, but it was becoming impossible to retain his thoughts. A blink was all it took to return to the murk. Time drifted. When it occurred to Raif that his cup was empty he held it out to be filled. The ice fog was rising and the door was sealed against it, and a man could do worse than sit in the warmth and drink.
So that was what he did. Hours passed and the lamp smoke thickened and sea ice beyond the chamber boomed and cracked. No one spoke. The Listener paid attention to the lamp, tamping the wick ever lower into whale oil. Raif’s shoulders sought the hard comfort of the chamber wall as his head grew heavy with sleep. Soon it became increasingly hard to stay awake. And as his eyes closed and he drifted toward oblivion, he saw the Far Rider watching him with cold and knowing eyes.
“The Sull are not our people and they do not fear us.”
Raif heard the voice of his clan and knew to be afraid . . . but the alcohol was in him and sleep pulled hard upon him.
And when he woke two days later Ash was gone.

CHAPTER TWO
The Widows’ Wall
The only way to drink mare’s urine was quickly, so Raina closed her eyes, scrunched her face and downed it in one [missing]. It really was quite dreadful, sweet and pungent, still steaming from the horse’s bladder, yet she’d sampled worse in her time. Tern Sevrance’s homebrew, for one. And the taste of her own fear.
Besides, it had to be better than sheep dung . . . that and ground-up beetle parts set to stand in curdled milk. Anwyn Bird swore by sheep dung, but she was an ewe farmer’s daughter and heavily biased toward sheep. No. Better to be safe in this. The old family remedies were the best; the ones whispered by sisters and cousins and mother and aunts. How best to prevent conception of a child.
Letting the ladle drop to the bucket, Raina rose to her feet. She needed to be gone from here. A pale dawn was breaking, and Eadie Callow and the other dyers would be taking their places soon enough. A chief’s wife could not be seen here, not alone, not with the newly delivered mare’s stale from the horseblock. Eadie Callow might have the slow eyes and stained hands of a dyer, but a sharpness lived behind her dull gaze, and the black ink on her fingers concealed the pale white flesh of a Scarpe. All the dyers and fullers were Scarpemen. They had ways with potash and urine and fuller’s earth that other men lacked. It was said that no other clan in the clanholds could dye such a perfect shade of black.
Mace had brought Scarpemen by the hundred to the Hailhold. Every day more arrived; warriors mounted on Spire-bred horses, women pulled behind them in poison-pine carts. The Scarpehold had been torched. The silent white-winter warriors of Clan Orrl had sent a message of fire in the night, and flames from the Scarpehold’s sod-and-timber roof had been seen throughout the North. By many accounts only the stonework still stood, but even that had been cracked and blackened, and returning Hailsmen whispered that sleeping there was like spending a night in a scorched field. Stangs from the Scarpe Tree, the poison pine that grew nowhere else in the clanholds except the hills surrounding Scarpe, had been used in construction of the roof. Many of them were still whole, but the deadly smoke given off during their charring caused more deaths than the most fiercely burning oak.
Raina’s mouth tightened as she closed the dyehouse door. She could find little sympathy for Scarpe.
Mace Blackhail’s birthclan was not her own. Yelma Scarpe, the Weasel chief, had brought the torching upon herself. She had unleashed her sharp little tongue upon Orrl, claiming land and strongwalls and hunting rights, and then, never short of clever talk and clever schemes, she had set the might of Blackhail upon them. Five warriors murdered in the frost-broken lands to the west, one the Orrl chief’s grandson; a dozen more Orrl warriors slain during a border skirmish when both Blackhail and Scarpe rode against them.
And then there was the killing of the Orrl chief himself.
Corbie Meese and his crew found the bodies, on the Old Dregg Trail, two days west of Dhoone. Eleven white-winter warriors and Spynie Orrl, their bodies clad in the strangely shifting cloth Orrl was known for, their heads forced so far down into their chest cavities that the scout who first came upon them thought the bodies beheaded. Corbie Meese knew the truth of it. Only a score of hammermen in the North, himself included, were capable of striking such a blow.
Shivering, Raina made her way toward the widows’ hearth, which formed the uppermost chamber of the roundhouse.
No one knew who had ordered the Orrl chief’s slaying. Spynie and his men had been traveling a dangerous path between warring clans, and there were some who whispered that the Orrl chief had been returning from a secret parley with the Dog Lord at Dhoone. Raina set no store by that. She knew Spynie Orrl, had spent a summer at the Orrlhouse in her youth, and even though he had no liking for the Hail Wolf, he would not turn his back on his oath.
Old words and old loyalties ran deep here, in the westernmost reaches of the clanholds. Clans were older, the living was harder, and for a thousand winters the Hail chief had looked upon the Orrl chief as his man.
Yet the Hail chief was new to his name and clan. Raina could clearly remember the time when Mace had first arrived from Scarpe. He was to be her fostered son, a skinny youth mounted on a big-eared stallion trapped with the weasel fur and black leathers of Scarpe. All that first year he had made a point of calling himself a Scarpeman. He had continued to sheathe his longsword in a braided scabbard—although he knew very well that Hailsmen considered such a housing fussy and impractical—and had stuck stubbornly to Scarpe’s many other peculiarities of dress. It had been a full eighteen months before Mace had succumbed to clan pressure to cut his waist-length hair, and a year after that before he finally exchanged his measure of powdered Scarpestone for one from the Hailstone instead.
Raina sighed deeply as she took the stair leading up to the widows’ hearth. Too often these days she found herself wondering just where her husband’s allegiances lay. He might have given his oath to Blackhail and proclaimed himself its chief, but he continued to favor his birth clan over his adopted one. Dagro would never have placed Scarpe above Orrl, or invited dispossessed Scarpemen to rest their swords in his roundhouse.
Oh gods. What does it matter, what Dagro would have done? Dagro was gone. Dead. And the boy he had taken as a son was now married to his wife.
“Lady.”
Raina turned on the stair to see Lansa Tanner on the landing below. The young girl bobbed her head, setting golden curls dancing. “The chief awaits you in his chamber.”
Raina could still see the blush on her cheeks. Foolish child, to let a conversation with Mace impress her so. “Tell my husband I will join him when my business with the widows is done.”
The girl waited for more, lips prettily parted, bars of light from the arrow slits slicing across her throat. No one dismissed a chief’s request out of hand; there had to be an apology or explanation. When none came the girl’s mouth closed and something less pretty happened to her face. Without another word she turned and descended the stair.
What is happening here? Resting her weight against the sandstone wall, Raina watched the girl go. She had woven birth cloths for all the Tanner girls, washed their soiled linens and combed their tangled hair. How had Mace managed to steal their loyalty from her?
The sounds and smells of early morning followed Raina as she climbed the little stair to the widows’ hearth. The crackle of newly lit fires and the sizzle of ham upon them competed with the clangor from the forge. Once her mouth would have watered at the aroma of blackening fat, and her pace would have quickened to meet the day, but here and now she felt nothing but the hard sense of duty that had become her life.
She was a chief’s wife, first woman of the clan, and Mace Blackhail could not take that from her.
The door to the widows’ hearth was old and deeply carved, the wood a silvery gray. The lightest touch of Raina’s hand was all it took to set the quarter ton of rootwood in motion. The steady clack of looms greeted her as she stepped into the room.
Merritt Ganlow, Biddie Byce and Moira Lull were at their frames, weaving. Old Bessie Flapp, whose great dislike of her husband made her a widow by choosing if not fact, was carding raw wool with her liver-spotted hands. Others were at tables, sewing and embroidering, spinning, and stretching the warps. The light was good here, and all the heat generated by the countless hearths burning throughout the roundhouse rose through the timbers on its journey toward the roof. The ceiling was low and barrel-vaulted, the bloodwood stangs made bright by a wash of yellow ocher. As it always did when she entered the chamber, Raina’s gaze fell upon the hearthstone.
The widows’ wall, it was called, and the brown stain upon it was said to be Flora Blackhail’s blood. Wife to the Mole chief Mordrag Blackhail, Flora had gone mad with grief upon receiving word of her husband’s death. A messenger had arrived at the roundhouse in the dark of night, telling how Mordrag had been crushed by a collapsing cave wall in the Iron Caves to the south. Frantic and inconsolable, Flora had fled to the uppermost chamber of the roundhouse and stabbed herself with her carding shears.
Stupid woman, Raina thought. For the messenger who brought word was a stranger to the clan, and Mordrag still lived, though he had lost half a leg to gangrene. When news of his wife’s death reached him, Mordrag mourned for thirty days, and then took himself a new bride. And the chamber Flora died in became a home for the widows of the clan.
“Raina!” Merritt Ganlow spoke from behind her loom, her hands never losing contact with shuttle and thread. “Are you here as widow or wife?”
Raina nodded at the stout woolwife. “I’m here as friend, I hope.”
Merritt grunted. “Then as a friend I trust no words will find their way back to the Wolf.”
The widows had little love for Mace Blackhail. No Scarpewomen ever found their way to the widows’ wall, though there were plenty of widows amongst them. They knew they were not welcome, could see that their tattooed widows’ weals set them apart. Scarpe widows did not cut themselves, as Blackhail widows did, claiming the pain of loss was enough. Why should they cut their flesh and pain themselves more?
Pushing back her sleeves so the raised skin around her wrists showed, Raina said, “You and I both lost husbands in the Badlands, Merritt Ganlow. Would that their deaths generated kinship, not distrust.”
“You found yourself a new husband quick enough.” Other women looked up at Merritt’s words and nodded. Someone at the back whispered, “Quick as a bitch in heat!”
Oh Dagro. Why did you leave me alone to bear this? Steeling herself against emotion, Raina said, “Life goes on, Merritt, and the clan needs strong women to guide it. Perhaps your place is here, with the widows weaving cloth, but mine is not. I have been too long at the fore of things to retire to a life of wool and stitching. Losing a husband does not change who I am. And it’s not within me to claim the widow’s privilege of sitting near the fire and growing old.”
The shuttle in Merritt’s hand slowed. “Aye, you always were a hard one, Raina Blackhail.”
“Hardness in a man is called strength.”
“Aye, and strength, as you would have it, isn’t solely the preserve of those who lead. There’s strength to be found here, in the act of weaving quietly and carrying on.”
“I know it, Merritt. That is why I have come.” For the first time since she had entered the widows’ hearth, Raina felt a lessening of the tension. Slender and lovely Moira Lull cleared the space beside Merritt on the bench.
The women at the back returned to their tasks and Merritt took both hands from her loom and turned to face Raina full-on. “You’re looking thin,” she said.
Raina sat. “Food is scarce.”
“Not for a chief’s wife.”
“I’m busy.” Raina shrugged. “There’s little time to stop and eat.”