"Julian May - Trillium 1 - Black Trillium" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

Surviving members of their defeated armies told tales of demonic freezing fogs,
whirlwinds from which inhuman eyes seemed to glare, unseasonable mountain
storms with snow, sleet, and hail, monstrous rock slides, fulminating murrains that
struck down the war-fronials, and other calamities that had assailed them. It
seemed almost as though supernatural forces were arrayed in opposition to the
invasions. But even if the guardposts in the pass could have been taken, the
sodden morass beyond presented an even more formidable obstacle to an invading
force.

As every Labornoki Master-Trader knew only too well.

This audacious and free-wheeling guild of merchants, which passed its franchise
and certain life-protecting incantations from father to son, included the only
citizens of our kingdom who knew the secret route into the heart of Ruwenda. It
was suspected by more than one Labornoki general, infuriated and frustrated in
futile attempts to pry coherent directions or even a useful map out of the
uncooperative Masters, that dark magic had been evoked to lock their lips during
questioning. Eventually, however, the route would be revealed through the craft of

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the mighty sorcerer Orogastus, about whom more anon. But in earlier days the
Masters kept their secret well, and enjoyed not only a prosperous monopoly but
also a sizable measure of political power.

A typical caravan led by four Master-Traders was small, consisting of no more
than twenty volumnial drawn wagons and perhaps fifty men. After giving the hill-
fort commanders certain passwords, the Masters would lead the wagon-train into
the Mire along an unmarked and treacherous elevated roadway. Only a few
isolated places between the mountainous borderlands and the Ruwenda Citadel
two hundred leagues hence were blessed with solid, unquakable land. The largest
dry region, lying east of the Trade Road, was the Dylex Country, where polders or
diked and drained fields contained well-cultivated farms, pastures, and scattered
townships. Virk, the largest of these, engaged in the simple refining of minerals
brought in by the Uisgu or Nyssomu Oddlings and was a secondary center of the
Ruwenda gem and precious metal trade. By far the greater portion of this
commerce, however, took place at the Citadel, the capital of Ruwenda, which
perched upon a sizable rock dome upthrust in the midst of the Mazy Mire.

Once at the Citadel, Master-Traders paid the royal road-tax. (They also paid a
capriciously variable wholesale goods tax upon departure, one of the great sore
points in Ruwendian-Labornoki relations.) Then they were free to sell their own
merchandise in the great Citadel Market, after which they might proceed to
commodity exchanges dealing in minerals or timber. The latter was obtained by
Ruwendian agents from the forest-dwelling Wyvilo Oddlings. Masters in search
of more exotic trade goods would travel some one hundred leagues further, via
Ruwendian punt or flatboat, up the sluggish Lower Mutar River to its confluence
with the Vispar, where lay the ruined city of Trevista — and in its plazas, the