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

even pirates could be seduced by the lure of trade, and Firaz ibn
Bakir (and his partners) had reaped profit from that truth. Enough
so to have him back now for a third time, standing in a knife-like
wind on a bitter morning, waiting for them to get on with burning
Halldr Thinshank on a boat with his weapons and armour and his
best household goods and wooden images of the gods and one of
his slave girls . . . and a horse.

A pale grey horse, a beauty, Halldr's favourite, and missing. On a
very small island.

Ibn Bakir looked around. A sweeping gaze from the town square
could almost encompass Rabady. The harbour, a stony beach,
with a score of Erling ships and his own large roundship from the
south—the first one in, which ought to have been splendid news.
This town, sheltering several hundred souls perhaps, was deemed
an important market in the northlands, a fact that brought private
amusement to the merchant from Fezana, a man who had been
received by the khalif in Cartada, who had walked in the gardens
and heard the music of the fountains there.

No fountains here. Beyond the stockade walls and the ditch
surrounding them, a quilting of stony farmland could be seen, then
livestock grazing, then forest. Beyond the pine woods, he knew,
the sea swept round again, with the rocky mainland of Vinmark
across the strait. More farms there, fisher-villages along the coast,
then emptiness: mountains and trees for a very long way, to the
places where the reindeer ran (they said) in herds that could not be
numbered, and the men who lived among them wore antlers
themselves to hunt, and practised magics with blood in the winter
nights.

Ibn Bakir had written these stories down during his last long journey
home, had told them to the khalif at an audience in Cartada,
presented his writings along with gifts of fur and amber. He'd been
given gifts in return: a necklace, an ornamental dagger. His name
was known in Cartada now.

It occurred to him that it might be useful to observe and chronicle
this funeral—if the accursed rites ever began.

He shivered. It was cold in the blustering wind. An untidy dump of
men made their way towards him, tacking across the square as if
they were on a ship together. One man stumbled and bumped
another; the second one swore, pushed back, put a hand to his
axe. A third intervened, and took a punch to the shoulder for his
pains. He ignored it like an insect bite. Another big man. They were
all, ibn Bakir thought sorrowfully, big men.

It came to him, belatedly, that this was not really a good time to be