"R. A. MacAvoy - L1 - Lens of the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

sure I would have grown tall on the meals dished into our tin plates if I had that growth within me. Most
of the masters were very compan-ionable, at least to me. I learned two languages; a simplistic geography;
a minimal art of courtesy (which I have now lost again, my king is well aware); skill with the broadsword,
the rapier, and the spear; the cleaning and maintenance of the powder catapult and harquebus; practical
horse ménage; the making of beds; the sanitation of latrines; wrestling and pinch-ing and threatening other
boys to good effect; and a hundred other martial skills, which I will never use. I also developed a
manuscript hand that is better than I deserve and an accent in speech purely Old Vesting, owing nothing
to the Zaquesh-Ion influence, which has sullied the pronunciation of most of the people of Velonya.
(Or should it be said that your Vestingish ancestors, sir, have imperfectly imposed their language
upon a people largely Zaquash by birth? And does it matter which of these expla-nations is true, or both?
The accent has served me well, and I digress again.)
In short, I had the education of the usual rural lord. I was no lord, however, and had only my
acceptance long, ago into Sordaling School to testify that my birth was more or less gentle. My destiny
was the common one—to be remitted as knight-contract into the forces of whatever school donor came
to the school to recruit and who fancied me.
I was eligible for such remission when I turned fifteen, but at that time I looked twelve, and as I felt a
great reluctance to enter into the service of Baron Howdl, Sordaling’s most intimate neighbor and patron,
I stood at attention with the younger boys sand no master betrayed me.
Howdl was a handsome man—though he had not so good a face as his daughter—and he sat, a fine
figure on a horse, but he was a black and surly employer who refused to follow the government of
Velonya into the modern age and who made himself tyrant to his dependents. Though his honors were all
near Sordaling and therefore secure both from Rezh-mian incursion and the coast raids of the Falinkas,
he was always recruiting, because he could not hold on to his men. I disliked the thought of owing
allegiance to such a man and feared he would someday find out how I had aided his daughter to
misbehave.
Howdl was either fooled by my tactics of concealment or, as is more likely, found that my personal
inadequacies over-came the good reports of my instructors. He did not look at me more than once.
The following summer a rumor came that he had killed his daughter in a fit of rage. Grief and fury
nearly led me to chal-lenge the man when! heard that, but he would merely have had me thrown into
prison for my temerity, and I’d be digging the baron’s own fields in a checkered burlap coat with a chain
around my leg. Besides, it was only a rumor. Another rumor had it that she was not dead, but had been
spirited away to de-liver a bastard baby. A third had it that he had killed her be-cause of the bastard. I
did not know which of these was more probable; it had been three years since I had seen her, and the
years between thirteen and sixteen are very long. Whatever had happened to take Lady Charlan out of
our sight, it made me very grateful to have escaped Howdl’s winnowing and more re-solved against
falling into any lord’s power at all.
After this event, Headmaster Greve, who was a kindly man and much more lenient than the
headmaster who had originally admitted me, made me sure to know that I could not stay on as student
past my twentieth birthday. Nor could
I hope to change my role into that of skills master, because all masters at Sordaling School had
proven themselves either in war service or state work (or were placed there as a cheap and honorable
retirement by one of the noble donors, but the headmaster never admitted as much aloud). Nor would
any of the deans or masters hire me on in any capacity of service, for the graduates of Sordaling School
were not to be common servants, or at least not within sight of the present students. In short, I must be
gone.
From the ages of sixteen to nineteen, I lived unhappily in the knowledge that I would have to take
employment some-where. I suffered anxiety that I would never be picked, and would leave the school
trotting on shanks’ mare, with sixpence and references, unemployable at my own trade and, fated to
become a drudge somewhere far from home. I had frequent bad dreams to this effect.
Each time the school was winnowed, however, I did my panicked best to be invisible.