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

 CHAPTER 2

To the Great Khan and Lord of Grass:
Neckless Peter Wilson, elderly and once your servant and ambassador, submits and conveys this
report of information concerning the history, winning, and holding of North Map-Mexico by the young
Captain-General Small-Sam Monroe — by whose order this is forwarded sealed from all eyes but
yours, Great Lord.
Twenty-seven years ago, a band of fugitive Trappers — driven south from the mountains and
ice-wall of Map-Colorado by the Cree — stopped to rest at Gardens, the town in forest and of forest.
Their notable persons were Jack Monroe, that mythic fighting man; Catania Olsen, a physician; Joan
Richardson, an Amazon; and Tattooed Newton, to be revealed errant third son to the ruler of Middle
Kingdom.
Within the year, Jack Monroe was dead — in tales, murdered by a bear jealous of his strength.
Within this time also, Newton, with Dangerous-Joan Richardson, returned to the Boxcars' Middle
Kingdom, where he came in time to his inheritance. On his death, years later — while arranging a
reasonable agreement in Map-Kentucky — Dangerous-Joan was left to rule as Dowager Queen, and
remains so today, aged, but no less dangerous.
As these storied ones met their fates, so Catania Olsen, caring for an orphaned Trapper baby,
Small-Sam Monroe, traveled down to North Map-Mexico, and into the Sierra Oriental.
In the Sierra, after killing two men — one having attempted rape, the other having tried to steal her
goat — Catania Olsen became physician to the savages and bandits of the mountains, and came to be
loved by them.
Her adopted son, Small-Sam, grew to manhood in those harsh and freezing altitudes — a world
largely peopled, as all North Map-Mexico had been, by North Americans driven south centuries before,
as the cold came down. So their language was and is book-English, their ways also informed by those
surviving copies of Warm-time books.
The original, the Beautiful Language, now is only spoken in the Empire of Map South-Mexico and
Guatemala — and, one assumes, in the continent of wilderness below.
Twenty-two years passed after Doctor Olsen's arrival. Then, the Empire's Duke Alphonso da
Carvahal attempted a reconquest of their lost northern territories. This went badly.
In a series of attacks along the western flank of the Sierra Oriental, Carvahal lost battle after battle
— never, as the Warm-time saying had it, 'getting his ducks in a row.'
In these battles, the men and women of North Map-Mexico lost two leaders slain. A third, a very
young man, was elected for lack of better. This was Small-Sam Monroe, and at the town God-Help-Us,
he attacked the imperial forces by night, and defeated them. Then he sent all the common-soldier
prisoners south, alive and whole, at the plea of his Second-mother, Catania Olsen, whose name is still
praised as a saint's for mercy in South Map-Mexico and Guatemala.
The duke and his officers were disemboweled.
So successful as a war leader that no man cared to stand against him in rule, young Small-Sam
found himself acclaimed Captain-General of all the provinces of North Map-Mexico — as they still are
named in the Beautiful Language, Baja California Norte, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo
Leon, now united.
He was urged to invade the south as the south had invaded the north, and so destroy the Empire. He
refused, on consideration of that ancient stability better left preserved.
Now twenty-seven years old — though looking older — Sam Monroe rules south from the Bravo
down into both Sierras, and east from the Gulf of California and Ocean Pacific to the Great Gulf Entire.
He enforces lightly in rule and taxes — but holds the towns, villages, mountains and fields of these
fractious and turbulent people as with a fine noose, which lies slack unless tugged against.
He is respected and popular, but treated with caution, since his reasons for violence are often not
anticipated by ordinary men.