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

and to the north; there was an artificial stream coming down,
falling through a stepped marble trough in a chuckling tumble.
Cypresses on either side, opening out into circles around the
pools, each with its benches and flowerbeds, and the hedges
around those. So.

She looked back at Lele. The serf girl was nearly her age. Deng
the foreman's daughter, one of Yolande's birthday presents,
given to her like a puppy five years ago. I'm getting too old to
play with serfs, Yolande decided. Tantie Rahksan's son Ali had
been fun, always ready to climb and stuff, but he had gotten all
sullen and close-mouthed lately. Lele was better, but she was so
weak and slow… All serfs were, of course. Yolande sighed
imperiously, then led the way at a stop-motion leopard crawl
toward the hedge; they were on clipped grass, which made it
easier to move quietly. Reconnaissance was fun; there was a
thrill to spying on the grownups, and you could hear things they
wouldn't say in front of a child.

Dew chilled her chest and stomach as she crawled; mouth
open and breathing light and regular, the way the trainers said.
Test your path, touch it lightly. Don't look at anything bright, it
cripples your night-vision. She reached the hedge, rolled under
the bench and curled her body to lie under it, a hand's-breadth
back from the prickly leaves; it was whitethorn, not the shaggy
multiflora used for field-boundaries out in the working part of
the plantation. Lele followed more clumsily; they lay head to
head, feet pointing in opposite directions along the circle.
Yolande applied her eye to a natural gap.

Ooops, she thought. It was her mother and father, sitting at
their ease in the pool; a housegirl was on one of the inner
benches in the background, strumming on a mandolin. The pool
itself was a circle of white-and-green marble two meters across,
with water entering and leaving by the top and bottom ends.
Tantie Rahksan was there, too, laying out a tray with wine and
fruit and a waterpipe. That was unusual: Tantie had been with
Ma forever, and she never did menial's work. Supervised the
house staff, and she had run the nursery before the Ingolfsson
children were of school age. She was quite old, too, nearly as old
as Ma, nearly forty. From Afghanistan; you had to look in the
history books for that, it wasn't there any more.

Oh. Tantie Rahksan had drawn her tunic over her head, and
gotten into the pool, too; all she had on was a string of beads
around her waist. It was funny, she didn't look all that old. Field
wenches were just solid and brown and lumpy when they were
forty, and the ones in the Great House got fat, mostly, but
Rahksan was all curvy still. Her breasts floated up when she sat
between Yolande's mother and father, handing them each a glass