"S. M. Stirling - Shikari in Galveston" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

assembled free men of the clan to make laws.
And, he thought with a grin, to make marriages and chase girls and swap and dicker and guzzle
popskull, boast, and tell tales. Robre was a noted tale-teller himself, when the mood was on him. Time to
trade with outland men, too.
Dannulsford was as far north on the Three Forks River as you could float anything bigger than a canoe;
that meant the Fair of the Alligators was far larger than most. There were Kumanch come down over the
Westwall escarpment with strings of horses and buffalo pelts; Cherokee from the north with fine tobacco,
rock-oil to burn in lamps, and bars of wrought iron for smiths; Dytchers from the Hill Country with wine
and applejack and dried fruits; and black-skinned men from the coast with sugar and rum, rice and
cinnamon and nutmeg.
Some from even farther away. A Mehk trader rode by, wearing a broad sombrero and tight jacket and
tooled-leather chaps over buttoned knee-breeches, his silver-studded saddle glistening. The great wagons
behind him were escorted by a brace of leather-jacketed lancers, short stocky men with brown skins and
smooth cheeks, bandannas on their heads beneath broad-brimmed hats, gold rings in their ears, machetes at
their belts, sitting their horses as if they'd grown there.
Say what you like about Mehk, they can ride for certain sure, Robre thought: or at least their
caballeros and fighters could. Among the Seven Tribes every free man was a warrior, but it was different
beyond the Wadeyloop River.
The merchant the lancers served was crying up his wares as he went; fine drink distilled from the
maguay cactus, silks and silver jewelry and bright painted pots, tools and sundries, dried hot peppers and
gaudy feathers and cocoa and coffee in the bean. He had muskets and powder and round lead balls for
sale, too; Robre's lip curled.
A smoothbore flintlock didn't have the range or accuracy of a good bow, and it was a lot slower to
use—slower even than the crossbows some favored. A musket was useful for shooting duck with birdshot,
or for a woman to keep around the cabin for self-defense, but he didn't think it was a man's weapon.
All the foreigners stood out, among his own folk of the Seven Tribes—the fearless free-striding maidens
in shifts that showed their calves or even their knees, wives more decorous in long skirts and headscarves,
men much like himself in thigh-length hunting shirts of linsey-woolsey or cotton, breechcloiits and leggings
of deer hide, soft boots cross-laced to the knee, their long hair confined by headbands and topped by
broad-brimmed leather hats often decorated by a jaunty feather or two, their beards clipped close to the
jaw.
Robre returned waves and calls with a polite heya, but stopped to talk with none, not even the children
who followed him calling Hunter! Robre the Hunter! Story, story, story!
Partly that was a wordless shyness he would never confess at the sheer press of people; he was more at
home in the woods or prairies, though he knew he cut a striking figure, and had a fitting pride in it, and in
the fact that many men knew his deeds. He was tall even for his tall people, his shoulders and arms thick,
chest deep, legs long and muscular, a burly blue-eyed, black-haired young man. who kept his face shaved in
an outland fashion just spreading among some of the younger set. His hunting shirt of homespun cotton was
mottled in shades of earth brown and forest green; at his waist he bore a long knife and a short sword in
beaded leather sheaths, with a smaller blade tucked into his right boot-top. Quiver and bow rode at his
shoulder—he preferred the shorter, handier recurved horn-and-sinew Kumanch style to the more usual
wooden longbow—and a tomahawk was thrust through a loop at the small of his back.
The man he sought should be down by the levee on the river-bank, where the flatboats and canoes
clustered. And where . . .
Yes. That's it, and no other.
The boat from the coast was huge, for all its shallow draft, like a flat tray fifty feet long and twenty wide.
At its rear was an odd contraption like a mill's wheel, and amidships was a tall thin funnel; a flag fluttered
red and white and blue from a slender mast, a thing of diagonal crosses—the Empire's flag. Somehow a fire
made the rear wheel go round to drive the boat upstream—
Robre made a covert sign with his fingers at the thought, and whistled a few bars of the Song Against