"S. M. Stirling - Draka 03 - The Stone Dogs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

and flowers; roses, he thought, opening their blooms to the hot
Italian night. Sweat tickled his flanks under the linen of his
djellaba robe, under the leather of the shoulder-holster harness
beneath it.

For a moment, he considered going back to the birthday
party, rather than seeking out his sister and her husband. No, he
decided. The people were salt of the earth, no doubt about that.
Local planters, of course, overseers, Combine and League execs
from the nearby towns… not many of them personally known to
him. And face it, provincial, he thought. And politics keeps me
in Archona too much, and Johanna and Tom seem to have
grown on to this place like a pair of barnacles.

He would not have thought it of her, or of Thomas Ingolfsson
either, when the man had been a neighbor and a friend and a
rakehell fighter pilot in his sister's squadron, back during the
War… Well, time and marriage and children do change us, he
thought, and walked up the steps. The stone was smooth and
warm and slightly gritty under his bare feet.
 "Shhhh, Lele!" Yolande Ingolfsson hissed.

The night was quiet on this side of the hill; the house was
visible only as a glow through the treetops ahead of them, the
noise of the guests less than that of the crickets and nightjars
and the slow rubbing of branch and thicket. Away to her right in
the valley were the lights of the Quarters, but the party there
would have ended sooner, the plantation-hands had to be back at
their work tomorrow, getting ready for the vintage.

The serf girl beside her looked subdued. Yolande sighed to
herself as she squirmed on her stomach past the topiary bush.
This whole birthday party for Ma had been boring. The gifts
were stupid stuff, mostly: statues and paintings and jewelry, or
Combine shares and like that. She gritted her teeth. And her
cousin Alexandra von Shrakenberg had been put in charge of the
children's part of the celebrations, and that was… was…
impossible, she decided; that was the word. Being ten was
impossible, too.

Alexandra's only thirteen, that's only three years older than
me, she thought resentfully. Stuck-up. Because she was in Senior
School; all she could talk about was the serious things they had
to study and the boring love affairs at school and how her
parents' estate in France was prettier than Claestum…

Yolande heard voices and string-music from uphill. There was
a waist-high circle of clipped hedge ten meters before them. Her
eyes estimated the ground the way the instructor at school told
the children. The slope here was down from the wooded crest,