"Christopher Rowley - Bazil 02 - A Sword For A Dragon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowley Christopher)

They had been there for hours—the whole day to be precise, not to
mention the day before and the day before that. In fact, they’d been
coming to this forlorn spot for a full two weeks, and apart from the very
first day, it had been just like this, cold, wet, and absolutely miserable.

There’d been nothing to eat but cold jerky and oats for a week, no
company except a sulky dragon, and not even a fire since everything in the
woods was soaked through and beyond the powers of even such a good fire
starter as Relkin Orphanboy.

Worst of all was the knowledge that with a four-week leave, they could
have gone much farther afield, perhaps all the way back to the coastal
cities, where Relkin could have solved his biggest problem. Since he was
under the age of sixteen, he was too young to be let into the military
brothels, and General Paxion had made the morals of dragonboys and
young soldiers alike a priority of his stewardship of Fort Dal-housie.
Freelance trollops caught working outside the legal brothels were likely to
get military justice, which had just about eliminated them from the
district. Thus almost all opportunities for a fast maturing dragonboy to
learn more of the mysteries of sex had disappeared. Of course, there were
girls in the town, on nearby farms, and even in the fort, but their parents
would not have them mixing with dragonboys, oh no, not for a moment.
Dragonboys were all orphans, the dregs of the coastal cities, and who
wanted such landless trash mixing with one’s daughters? Not the good
citizenry of Dalhousie, that was for sure, even though those same good
citizens depended on the courage and tenacity of those very same boys in
battle.

A quick trip to the coast, to Marneri or even Talion, would have made
all the difference. They could have taken a riverboat to Razac and then
gone down the coast road. He could have done something about this
obsession with the opposite sex, and they could both have enjoyed some
warmer weather for a week or two, which would have made a fine antidote
to the long hard winter they’d endured while attached to the 87th Marneri
Dragons out at Fort Kenor.

Situated on the north flank of Mt. Kenor, overlooking the great river
and the western plains, Fort Kenor was easily the least comfortable of all
the forts in Kenor. The winds that ripped down the Gan from the High
Plateau of Hazog were cold enough to go through two wool shirts and a
freecoat with a fur lining.

But a promise was a promise, and dragons possessed keener memories
than either men or elephants, so there was no getting out of it. And so he
was here, watching a cold, wet, sulky dragon standing out there in the
meadow waiting for the love of his life to fly in.

And, of course, there was no sign of her, nothing to indicate that a silky
green dragoness was coming to this meadow high above the forest of