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

"You have to eat."
He took a sip of hot chocolate. "Thank you, Margaret."
Margaret turned and marched away, her boots crunching on the last of morning's frost, her rapier's
length swinging at her side.
Margaret Mosten, old enough to be an older sister, always served his breakfasts. Always served
every meal. She would come riding up to his horse, on campaign, with jerk-goat or crab apples for his
lunch. Boiled water, safe from tiny bad-things, for his leather bottle. No food came to him, but from
Oswald-cook by her hand.
Her predecessor, Elder Mosten, smelling something odd in chili, had tasted Sam's dinner once along
the northern border by Renosa, then convulsed and died.
"To you — only through me," his eldest daughter, Margaret, had said, then resigned her captaincy in
Light Infantry, and come to Sam's camp to take charge of it with a much harder hand than her father's
had been.
Though that fatal chili's cook had hung, Margaret had ridden back to Renosa, inquired more strictly,
and left four more hanging in the square — the cook's wife for shared guilt, and three others for
carelessness in preparation and service.
"That many," Sam had said to her when she returned, "and no more."
"The cook and his wife were for that dinner;" Margaret Mosten had answered him, "the others were
for our dessert."
So, as with many of his followers, the burden of her loyalty leaned against Sam Monroe, weighed
upon him, and tended to make him a short-tempered young man, everywhere but the battlefield.
He could take bites of the breakfast tortilla, but the sausage and eggs were impossible. He must not
— could not — vomit by his tent for the army to see.
"Too young," they'd say. "What is Sam, twenty-six, twenty-seven? Too young, after all, for a grown
man's work. All that winning must have been luck."
And Sam Monroe would have agreed it had been luck — the good fortune of having the Empire's
old, incompetent generals for enemies; the good fortune of having fine soldiers to fight for him; and what
had seemed the good fortune of being born with battle-sense.
But battle-sense had led to victories; victories had led to ruling. And ruling had proved a crueler field
than any battleground, and weightier duty.
It seemed to Sam, as he tried to eat a bite of eggs, that his will, which he had so far managed to
extend to any necessary situation — as if a much older, grimmer, and absolutely competent person stood
within him — that his will, his purposes, had turned him into that someone else, a man he would never
have liked and didn't like now.
The proof lay beneath the hill, in dead grass.
But even that grim and forceful person had not come forth this morning to eat goat sausage and
eggs.
Margaret came back, her sturdy bootsteps quieter; the light frost was melting under the morning sun.
"Sir...." With official business, "sir" was all the Captain-General required. Sam had early decided that
honorifics promoted pride and stupidity; he had the south's imperial examples.
"The brothers," Margaret Mosten said.
"Lord Jesus." He ate a bite of sausage to show he could, then took deep breaths to quiet his belly.
The Rascobs had to be spoken with, but a little later would have been better. "Will they wait?"
"No," Margaret said. "And it would hurt them to be told to."
That was it for the sausage. Sam took another deep breath and put down his two-tine fork — silver,
a spoil from God-Help-Us. "I'll see them."
"You should finish your eggs."
"Margaret, I don't want to finish the eggs. Now, send them up." Odd, when he thought about it.
Why 'send them up'? The camp was on high ground, but level. His tent was only 'up' because he gave
the orders.