"S. M. Stirling and Holly Lisle - The Rose Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

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The Rose Sea by S.M. Stirling and Holly Lisle




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CHAPTER I
First Captain Sir Bren Morkaarin, Hereditary Guardian of Timlake, yawned enormously, leaned back against his saddle and pulled
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his cloak over his legs. The deck was hard, but better than mud, which was something he'd slept in often enough on campaign;
summer nights in the clear dry air of the central provinces were just cool enough to make sleep comfortable.

The barge rocked, water chuckling against its bows. All three moons were up, silver coins in the sky—stately Falcon Father, Wolf
Mother near Him and The Child moving below, in their eternal dance. The river was high as a result—no worry of sandbars for a
while.

The towing cable curved away to the bank, black against the star-shot, moonlit water. The low-slung, pillar-legged shape of the
twofork leaned into its harness with ponderous deliberation. The towing beast was a formless lump in the darkness until it threw up
its head and showed the Y-shaped horn on its nose; it trumpeted a complaint through thick, blubbery lips.

Bren stretched and shifted position on the hard deck; it was the twenty-first hour, an hour past sundown in summertime. Nobody
was awake save the watchstander at the tiller, leaning silently on the long pole. Easy night for him, Bren thought, and grinned.
Behind his barge came ten more, equally quiet, dark save for the great glass-globe lanterns that hung from the sternposts above the
steering oar. Ten barges of men and women, pikes and halberds and muskets, barreled gunpowder and barreled salt pork and
hardtack, tents and bandages and boot grease and the boxed Shrine of the Three that moved with the standards. The whole of the
XIXth Imperial Regiment of Foot was on the move from garrison duty in the foothills of the North Shield Mountains to the seaport