"Mitchell Smith - Kingdom River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

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"Signals say company's coming!" Margaret Mosten's round pleasant face appeared beside the tent
flap. "From the Say-so mirror, far south slope."
Sam sat up. "What sort of company?"
 "Wings." Margaret seemed not to notice the leather vodka flask lying on the floor beside the cot, the
squeezed rind of lime from far south. "Some Boston flier, presumably. With winged item following." .
"From McAllen."
"Likely; they've been wanting to send someone down." Margaret watched him with concern. She'd
never mentioned his drinking, never would. But twice — when traveling, not on campaign — he'd drunk
from his saddle-flask to find the vodka and lime juice gone, replaced with water.
Sam swung off the cot. "What a pain in the ass." It was a Warm-time phrase out of copied books
almost five hundred years old, a phrase that had become popular in the army. Too popular, so rankers
were now forbidden to use it in reference to orders.
Sam stooped to pick up his sword belt... and had to steady himself, which Margaret appeared not
to notice. "Where?"
"Michael Sergeant-Major is waving the thing in to the football pitch."
"Alright." Looping the belted sword over his right shoulder to rest aslant down his back, he followed
Margaret out into an afternoon he found too bright for comfort, and cold with Lady Weather's
commencing fall into Lord Winter's arms.
The camp was seething like cooking Brunswick at the flier's coming, but soldiers settled down along
Sam's way, sensitive as girls to their commander's mood — many recalling duty elsewhere.
Football, the army's sport even in marching camps of war — though some said it was old
Warm-time rugby, really — had been marked to be played just south of horse-lines on a stretch of
meadow softened by cold-killed grass. The field, already enclosed by dismounted heavy cavalry, had
been cleared of all except Michael Sergeant-Major, Margaret Mosten's man, who stood in the center of
it waving a troop banner for a landing mark.
Sam saw a formed file of the Heavies' horse-archer squadron had arrows to their longbows. The
bows, their lower arms curved short for horseback shooting, were half-raised, arrows nocked. He
nodded that way. "Whose orders?"
"Mine," Margaret Mosten said.
"Quiver those arrows." He walked out onto the football field, looked up, and saw a figure high
against the blaze of the sun. Didn't have to come out of the sun. Making an entrance.
"The thing's above." Margaret had come out to him. She was carrying one of the Heavy Infantry's
crossbows, wound, cocked, and quarreled. "My privilege, sir," she said, as he noticed it. "Look there...."
High above the small human figure sailing down to them in silhouette — perhaps a woman, perhaps
not — a larger thing wheeled and flapped.
Soldiers murmured at the edges of the field.
"Silence!"
Their commander's mood confirmed, murmuring ceased.
In that quiet, the soft sound of cloth breezing could be heard. In dark-blue greatcoat and dark-blue
hat, the Boston person — certainly a woman — sailed down, sailed down… and settled with no
stumble on the ground. She held, sheathed in her right hand, a slender curved scimitar, and was smiling.
"Mountain Jesus," Margaret Mosten said. "She's a baby."
"Clever." Sam smiled to match the visitor's, and went to meet her. He was still drunk, and would
have to be careful.
The woman — the girl — had a white face, wind-roughened but beautiful, oval as an egg. Black hair
was drawn tightly back under the blue curl-brimmed hat, and her eyes were also black, dark as licorice
chews. Sam noticed her gloved hands were fine, but what could be seen of a slender wrist was corded
with sword-practice muscle.
The girl was smiling at him as if they were old friends — apparently knew him from description. "I