"George R. R. Martin - Ice and Fire 3 - A Storm of Swords" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

even a dozen mounted wildlings, and five hundred ...
"Smallwood sent Bannen and me wide around the van to catch a peek at the main
body," Kedge went on. "There was no end of them. They're moving slow as a
frozen river, four, five miles a day, but they don't look like they mean to go
back to their villages neither. More'n half were women and children, and they
were driving their animals before them, goats, sheep, even aurochs dragging
sledges. They'd loaded up with bales of fur and sides of meat, cages of
chickens, butter chums and spinning wheels, every damn thing they own. The
mules and garrons was so heavy laden you'd think their backs would break. The
women as well."
"And they follow the Milkwater?" Lark the Sisterman asked.
"I said so, didn't I?"
The Milkwater would take them past the Fist of the First Men, the ancient
ringfort where the Night's Watch had made its camp. Any man with a thimble of
sense could see that it was time to pull up stakes and fall back on the Wall.
The Old Bear had strengthened the Fist with spikes and pits and caltrops, but
against such a host all that was pointless. If they stayed here, they would be
engulfed and overwhelmed.
And Thoren Smallwood wanted to attack. Sweet Donnel Hill was squire to Ser
Mallador Locke, and the night before last Smallwood had come to Locke's tent.
Ser Mallador had been of the same mind as old Ser Ottyn Wythers, urging a
retreat on the Wall, but Smallwood wanted to convince him otherwise. "This
King-beyond-the-Wall will never look for us so far north," Sweet Donnel
reported him saying. "And this great host of his is a shambling horde, full of
useless mouths who won't know what end of a sword to hold. One blow will take
all the fight out of them and send them howling back to their hovels for
another fifty years."
Three hundred against thirty thousand. Chett called that rank madness, and
what was madder still was that Ser Mallador had been persuaded, and the two of
them together were on the point of persuading
the Old Bear. "If we wait too Ion& this chance may be lost, never to come
again," Smallwood was saying to anyone who would listen. Against that, Ser
Ottyn Wythers said, "We are the shield that guards the realms of men. You do
not throw away your shield for no good purpose," but to that Thoren Smallwood
said, "In a swordfight, a man's surest defense is the swift stroke that slays
his foe, not cringing behind a shield."
Neither Smallwood nor Wythers had the command, though. Lord Mormont did, and
Mormont was waiting for his other scouts, for Jarman Buckwell and the men
who'd climbed the Giant's Stair, and for Qhorin Halfhand and Jon Snow, who'd
gone to probe the Skirling Pass. Buckwell and the Halfhand were late in
returning, though. Dead, most like. Chett pictured Jon Snow lying blue and
frozen on some bleak mountaintop with a wildling spear up his bastard's arse.
The thought made him smile. I hope they killed his bloody wolf as well.
"There's no bear here," he decided abruptly. "Just an old print, that's all.
Back to the Fist." The dogs almost yanked him off his feet, as eager to get
back as he was. Maybe they thought they were going to get fed. Chett had to
laugh. He hadn't fed them for three days now, to turn them mean and hungry.
Tonight, before slipping off into the dark, he'd turn them loose among the
horse lines, after Sweet Donnel Hill and Clubfoot Karl cut the tethers.
They'll have snarling hounds and panicked horses all over the Fist, running