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

be divided into three groups: those living, those dead, and those at
sea.

Ibn Bakir had been awake before dawn this morning, praying to the
last stars of the night in thanks for his finally being numbered once
more among those in the blessed first group.

Here in the remote, pagan north, at this wind-scoured island market
of Rabady, he was anxious to begin trading his leather and cloth
and spices and bladed weapons for furs and amber and salt and
heavy barrels of dried cod (to sell in Ferrieres on the way home)
—and to take immediate leave of these barbarian Erlings, who
stank of fish and beer and bear grease, who could kill a man In a
bargaining over prices, and who burned their leaders—savages
that they were—on ships among their belongings when they died.

This last, it was explained to him, was what the horse was all about.
Why the funeral rites of Halldr Thinshank, who had governed
Rabady until three nights ago, were currently suspended, to the
visible consternation of an assembled multitude of warriors and
traders.

The offence to their gods of oak and thunder, and to the lingering
shade of Halldr (not a benign man in life, and unlikely to be so as a
spirit), was considerable, ibn Bakir was told. Ill omens of the
gravest import were to be assumed. No one wanted an angry,
unhoused ghost lingering in a trading town. The fur-clad, weapon-
bearing men in the windy square were worried, angry, and drunk,
pretty much to a man.

The fellow doing the explaining, a bald-headed, ridiculously big
Erling named Ofnir, was known to ibn Bakir from two previous
journeys. He had been useful before, for a fee: the Erlings were
ignorant, tree-worshipping pagans, but they had firm ideas about
what their services were worth.

Ofnir had spent some years in the east among the Emperor's
Karchite Guard in Sarantium. He had returned home with a little
money, a curved sword in a jewelled scabbard, two prominent
scars (one on top of his head), and an affliction contracted in a
brothel near the Sarantine waterfront. Also, a decent grasp of that
difficult eastern tongue. In addition—usefully—he'd mastered
sufficient words in ibn Bakir's own Asharite to function as an
interpreter for the handful of southern merchants foolhardy enough
to sail along rocky coastlines fighting a lee shore, and then east
into the frigid, choppy waters of these northern seas to trade with
the barbarians.

The Erlings were raiders and pirates, ravaging in their long-ships all
through these lands and waters and—increasingly­down south. But