"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dus 4 - Book of Silence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

Garth was unsure just where, amid the hills and mountains, he had crossed the
border between the Eramman Barony of Sland and the independent region of
Orgul; if there were any signposts or markers, he had missed them in the dark.
Shortly after dawn arrived, however, he topped the crest of the final
encircling ridge to see the valley of Orgul spread out before him, its fields
and forests a thousand shades of green, its rivers gleaming blue and silver in
the morning sun. He saw no traces of the draconic ravages he had been led to
expect.
In fact, he thought as he looked out across the countryside, Orgul
appeared far richer and more peaceful than the lands he had traversed to reach
it.
For the first three days after leaving Skelleth, he had ridden at a
leisurely pace across flat plains brown with mud, traveling openly by day and
stopping freely at the very few inns and taverns along the way. He had been
turned away once, simply because he was an overman, but had met no other
serious inconvenience or opposition until the third evening, when, amid the
smoldering ruins of a farm that chanced to lie between disputing baronies, a
human soldier took a shot at him with a crossbow. The quarrel missed its
target, and the man fled when Koros, Garth's warbeast, bared its fangs and
roared; Garth himself did not even have to draw his sword. Still, he knew he
had been lucky that the bolt had missed; he had not seen the man crouching
behind a broken wall.
After that he had traveled by night, sleeping by day in whatever cover
he could find. The land had grown ever richer as he moved south; though he
could see no color by night, at sunset and dawn the earth was lush and
green-where it hadn't been burned black.
That first burned-out farm had not been unique; as he continued on to
the south, he found many others, usually in clusters along the invisible lines
between baronies. Nor were farms the only things destroyed; he passed an inn
that was reduced to charred timbers, and a gallows nearby held three rotting
corpses. On one piece of prime land the blackened crops were still smoldering.
Some fields had been destroyed not by fire, but by marching feet, and one had
apparently been the site of a recent battle; it had been churned into a muddy
waste, strewn with broken links of mail and scraps of cloth spattered with
dark blood. Everything of value, every weapon that might be reforged or melted
down, had been removed, though Garth suspected that had been the work of
looters rather than the contending armies.
He rode by still more farms, some abandoned, some where families cowered
behind barricaded doors, and others where the doors were wide open in welcome,
on the assumption that resistance to the whims of soldiers would be fatal.
Garth avoided villages and towns and castles, giving them all wide berths, and
dodged any armed men he spotted in time. No unarmed humans were to be found
abroad after dark.
Those few patrols and sentries that he could not avoid, for whatever
reason, invariably let him pass unhindered after the warbeast clearly
indicated that it was ready to defend its master. Only rarely did Garth feel
it necessary to draw a blade or speak a serious threat. He considered himself
fortunate that he had not encountered any company larger than a patrol squad,
nor any other sniping bowman with a grudge against overmen.
Eramma, in the throes of internal war, he had seen as a patchwork of the