"Kay, Guy Gavriel - Last Light Of The Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

Rhiannon mer Brynn, his daughter

Helda, Rania, Eirin, Rhiannon's women



Siawn, leader of Brynn's fighting band

Other

Firaz ibn Bakir, merchant of Fezana, in the Khalifate of Al-Rassan

ONE

A horse, he came to understand, was missing. Until it was found
nothing could proceed. The island marketplace was crowded on
this grey morning in spring. Large, armed, bearded men were very
much present, but they were not here for trade. Not today. The
market would not open, no matter how appealing the goods on a
ship from the south might be.

He had arrived, clearly, at the wrong time.

Firaz ibn Bakir, merchant of Fezana, deliberately embodying in his
brightly coloured silks (not nearly warm enough in the cutting wind)
the glorious Khalifate of Al-Rassan, could not help but see this
delay as yet another trial imposed upon him for transgressions in a
less than virtuous life.

It was hard for a merchant to live virtuously. Partners demanded
profit, and profit was difficult to come by if one piously ignored the
needs—and opportunities—of the world of the flesh. The
asceticism of a desert zealot was not, ibn Bakir had long since
decided, for him.

At the same time, it would be entirely unfair to suggest that he lived
a life of idleness and comfort. He had just endured (with such
composure as Ashar and the holy stars had granted him) three
storms on the very long sea journey north and then east, afflicted,
as always at sea, by a stomach that heaved like the waves, and
with the roundship handled precariously by a continuously drunken
captain. Drinking was a profanation of the laws of Ashar, of course,
but in this matter ibn Bakir was not, lamentably, in a position to take
a vigorous moral stand.

Vigour had been quite absent from him on the journey, in any case.

It was said among the Asharites, both in the eastern home-lands of
Ammuz and Soriyya, and in Al-Rassan, that the world of men could