КулЛиб - Классная библиотека! Скачать книги бесплатно
Всего книг - 706312 томов
Объем библиотеки - 1349 Гб.
Всего авторов - 272769
Пользователей - 124662

Последние комментарии

Новое на форуме

Новое в блогах

Впечатления

DXBCKT про Калюжный: Страна Тюрягия (Публицистика)

Лет 10 назад, случайно увидев у кого-то на полке данную книгу — прочел не отрываясь... Сейчас же (по дикому стечению обстоятельств) эта книга вновь очутилась у меня в руках... С одной стороны — я не особо много помню, из прошлого прочтения (кроме единственного ощущения что «там» оказывается еще хреновей, чем я предполагал в своих худших размышлениях), с другой — книга порой так сильно перегружена цифрами (статистикой, нормативами,

  подробнее ...

Рейтинг: +1 ( 1 за, 0 против).
DXBCKT про Миронов: Много шума из никогда (Альтернативная история)

Имел тут глупость (впрочем как и прежде) купить том — не уточнив сперва его хронологию... В итоге же (кто бы сомневался) это оказалась естественно ВТОРАЯ часть данного цикла (а первой «в наличии нет и даже не планировалось»). Первую часть я честно пытался купить, но после долгих и безуспешных поисков недостающего - все же «плюнул» и решил прочесть ее «не на бумаге». В конце концов, так ли уж важен носитель, ведь главное - что бы «содержание

  подробнее ...

Рейтинг: 0 ( 0 за, 0 против).
DXBCKT про Москаленко: Малой. Книга 2 (Космическая фантастика)

Часть вторая (как и первая) так же была прослушана в формате аудио-версии буквально «влет»... Продолжение сюжета на сей раз открывает нам новую «локацию» (поселок). Здесь наш ГГ после «недолгих раздумий» и останется «куковать» в качестве младшего помошника подносчика запчастей))

Нет конечно, и здесь есть место «поиску хабара» на свалке и заумным диалогам (ворчливых стариков), и битвой с «контролерской мышью» (и всей крысиной шоблой

  подробнее ...

Рейтинг: +1 ( 1 за, 0 против).
iv4f3dorov про Соловьёв: Барин 2 (Альтернативная история)

Какая то бредятина. Писал "искусственный интеллект" - жертва перестройки, болонского процесса, ЕГЭ.

Рейтинг: 0 ( 0 за, 0 против).
iv4f3dorov про Соловьёв: Барин (Попаданцы)

Какая то бредятина. Писал "искусственный интеллект" - жертва перестройки, болонского процесса, ЕГЭ.

Рейтинг: +1 ( 1 за, 0 против).

Surrender None [Elizabeth Moon] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 3


 [Настройки текста]  [Cбросить фильтры]

safe to answer—the answer he’d thought of, while waiting for his father to come from the fields—his father shrugged. “But if the steward comes, what can I say? They have the right to take you, no matter what I think about it. The best I can hope for is that the steward forgets it.”

The steward did not forget. Gird spent the next day wrestling with the family’s smallest scythe—still too long for him—mowing his father’s section of the meadow. He knew he’d been sent there to get him out of sight, away from the other village boys. He knew his mother had baked two sweet cakes for Rauf’s family and Sikan’s, and his father had taken them over in the early morning. It was hot, the steamy heat of full summer, and the cold porridge of his breakfast had not filled the hollows from yesterday’s fast. But above him, in the great field, his father was working, able to see if he shirked.

He kept at it doggedly, hacking uneven chunks where his brother could lay a clean swathe. There had to be a way. He paused to rub the great curved blade with the bit of stone his father had given him, and listened to the change in sound it made on different parts of the blade. When he looked sideways up the slope to the arable, he saw his father talking to another of the village men. Gird leaned on the scythe handle, the blade angled high above him, and picked a bur from between his toes.

When he looked again, his father had started back up the arable. Gird dared not move out of the sun to rest, but he tipped his head back to get the breeze. Something rustled in the tall grass ahead of him. Rat? Bird? He scratched the back of one leg with the other foot, glanced upslope again, and sighed. Someday he would be a man, and if he wasn’t a soldier, he’d be a farmer, and able to swing a bigger scythe than this one. Like his father, whose sweeping strokes led the reapers each year. Like his brother Arin, who had just grown out of this scythe. He grunted at himself, and let the long blade down. Surely he could find a way to make this work better.

By nightfall, with all his blisters, he had begun to mow a level swathe. He’d changed the handles slightly, learned to get his hip into the swing, learned to take steps just the right length to compensate for the blade’s arc. The next day, he spent on the same patch of meadow. Now that he had the knack of it, he was half-hoping the steward would not come. He would grow up a farmer like his father, leading the reapers in the field, guiding his own oxen, growing even better fruit. . .

It was the next day that the steward came at dusk, when his father had come in from the fields, and Gird had begun to feel himself out of disgrace as far as the family went. The children were sent to the barton out back, while the steward talked, and his father (he was sure) listened. He wanted to creep into the cowbyre and hear for himself, but Arin barred the way. He had to wait until his father called him in.

There in the candlelight, his father’s face looked older, tireder. His mother sat stiffly, lips pressed together, behind her loom. The steward smiled at him. “Gird, the sergeant suggested that you were a likely lad to train for soldier: strong and brave, and in need of discipline. Your father will let you choose for yourself. If you agree, you will spend one day of ten with the soldiers this year, and from Midwinter to Midwinter next, two days of ten. It’s not soldiering at first, I’ll be honest with you: you’ll work in the barracks just as you’d work here. But your father’d be paid the worth of your work, a copper crab more than for fieldwork. And the following year, you’d be a recruit, learning warcraft, and your father will get both coppers and a dole off his fee. ’Twould help your family, in hard times, but your father says you must do as you wish.”

It was frightening to see his parents so still, so clearly frightened themselves. He had never really understood them before, he felt. Behind him, in the doorway, Arin and the others crowded; he could hear their noisy breathing. Could soldiering be so bad as they thought? All his life he’d seen the guardsmen strolling the village lane, admired the glitter of their buckles, the jingle of their harness. He’d been too young to fear the ordersticks, the clubs . . . he’d had strong hands rumpling his hair, when he crowded near with the other boys, he’d had a smile from the sergeant himself. And the soldiers fought off brigands, and hunted wolves and folokai; he remembered only last winter, cheering in the snow with the others as they carried back the dead folokai tied to poles. One of them had been hurt, his blood staining the orange tunic he wore, but the world was hard, and there were many ways to be hurt.

He wanted to stand on one leg and think about it, but there stood the steward, peering at him in the dimness with eyes that seemed to see clear into his heart. He’d never spoken to a lord before, exactly. Was the steward a lord? Close enough.

“It would not be a binding oath,” the steward said, a little impatiently. Gird knew that tone; his father had it when he asked who had left the barton wicket open. It meant a quick answer, or trouble. “If you did not like it, you could quit before you started the real training . . .”

Gird ducked his head, and then looked up at the steward. From one corner of his vision he could see his father’s rigid face, but he ignored it.

“Sir . . . steward . . . I would be glad to. If my father allows.”

“He has said it.” The steward smiled, then. “Dorthan, your son Gird is accepted into service of the Count Kelaive, and here is the pirik—” The bargain-sum, Gird remembered: not a price paid, as if he were a sheep, but a sum to mark the conclusion of any bargain. The price was somewhat else.

The very next morning, Gird left at dawn to walk through the village to the count’s guards’ barracks. None of his friends were out to watch him, but he knew they would be impressed. The guard at the gate admitted him, sent him straight across the forecourt to the barracks. The guards were just getting up, and the sergeant was crosser than Gird remembered.

“Get in the kitchen first, and serve the food; then you can clean for the cooks until after morning drill. I’ll see you then. Hop, now.”

The porridge was much like their own, if cooked in larger pots and served in bigger bowls. Gird carried the dirty bowls back, and scrubbed them, under the cook’s critical eye, then scrubbed the big cookpots. Then it was chop the onions, while his eyes burned and watered, and chop the redroots until his hands were cramped, and then fetch buckets of clean water. All the while the cook scolded, worse than his oldest sister, while mixing and kneading the dough that would be dumplings in the midday stew. The sergeant came in while Gird was still washing down the long tables.

“Right, lad. Now let’s see what we’ve got, here. Come along.” He led Gird out the side door of the kitchen, into a back court, a little walled enclosure like a barton with no byres. In one corner was the kitchen well, with the row of buckets Gird had scrubbed neatly ranged along the wall.

The sergeant was just as impressive as ever, to Gird’s eye: taller and broader than his own father, hard-muscled, with a brisk authority that expected absolute obedience. Gird looked at him, imagining himself grown into that size and strength, wearing those clean, whole, unmended clothes, having a place in the village and in his lord’s service more secure than any farmer.

“You’re a hard worker, and strong,” the sergeant began, “but you’ll have to be stronger yet, and you’ll have to learn discipline. Begin with this: you don’t talk unless you’re told to, and you answer with ‘sir’ any time I speak to you. Clear?”

Gird nodded. “Yes . . . sir?”

“Right. You’re here to learn, not to chatter. Dawn to dusk, one day of ten . . . can you count?”

“Not really, sir.”

“Not really is no. Can’t count sheep, or cows?”

Gird frowned. “If they’re there . . . but not days, sir, they don’t stay in front of me.”

“You’ll learn. Now, Gird: when you come here, you must be clean and ready to work. If you can’t wash at home, come early and wash here. I’ll have no ragtags in my barracks. Is that your only shirt?”

“No, sir, but th’other’s worse.”

“Then you’ll get one, but only for this work. Do you have shoes? Boots?”

Gird shook his head, then remembered to say “No, sir.” Shoes? For a mere lad? He had never had shoes, and wouldn’t until he wed, unless his father had a string of good years.

“You’ll need them later; you can wear them here, but not at home. Did you have breakfast at home this morning?” Of course he had not, beyond a bit of crust;