"Elizabeth Moon - Gird 01 - Surrender None" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

for this way—it’s no good. We can’t be fighting each other; the
world’s hard enough without that. They’ll have to know I punished
Gird, and I’ll have to go to them and apologize.”
So it was a whipping on top of his bruises, and no supper as well as
no lunch. Gird had expected as much; he saw from Arin’s wink that
he would have a scrap to eat later, whatever Arin could sneak to him
without being caught. But his father was as unhappy as his mother to
hear of the sergeant’s offer of training.
“It’s never good to come into notice like that. Besides, we follow the
Lady: would you take sword against your own folk, Gird? Break the
village peace in blood and iron?” But before he could decide whether
it was safe to answer—the answer he’d thought of, while waiting for
his father to come from the fields—his father shrugged. “But if the
steward comes, what can I say? They have the right to take you, no
matter what I think about it. The best I can hope for is that the
steward forgets it.”
The steward did not forget. Gird spent the next day wrestling with the

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Elizabeth Moon - Surrender None


family’s smallest scythe—still too long for him—mowing his father’s
section of the meadow. He knew he’d been sent there to get him out
of sight, away from the other village boys. He knew his mother had
baked two sweet cakes for Rauf’s family and Sikan’s, and his father
had taken them over in the early morning. It was hot, the steamy heat
of full summer, and the cold porridge of his breakfast had not filled
the hollows from yesterday’s fast. But above him, in the great field,
his father was working, able to see if he shirked.
He kept at it doggedly, hacking uneven chunks where his brother
could lay a clean swathe. There had to be a way. He paused to rub the
great curved blade with the bit of stone his father had given him, and
listened to the change in sound it made on different parts of the blade.
When he looked sideways up the slope to the arable, he saw his
father talking to another of the village men. Gird leaned on the scythe
handle, the blade angled high above him, and picked a bur from
between his toes.
When he looked again, his father had started back up the arable. Gird
dared not move out of the sun to rest, but he tipped his head back to
get the breeze. Something rustled in the tall grass ahead of him. Rat?
Bird? He scratched the back of one leg with the other foot, glanced
upslope again, and sighed. Someday he would be a man, and if he
wasn’t a soldier, he’d be a farmer, and able to swing a bigger scythe
than this one. Like his father, whose sweeping strokes led the reapers
each year. Like his brother Arin, who had just grown out of this
scythe. He grunted at himself, and let the long blade down. Surely he
could find a way to make this work better.
By nightfall, with all his blisters, he had begun to mow a level
swathe. He’d changed the handles slightly, learned to get his hip into