Добыча стрелка Шарпа by Бернард Корнуэлл

Author:Бернард Корнуэлл [Ismeretlen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: antique

Part Three

BATTLE’S EDGE

CHAPTER 10

The deep winter came and with it a fever. I have been lucky, rarely being ill, but a week after we reached Dunholm I began to shiver, then sweat, then feel as though a bear were clawing the insides of my skull. Brida made a bed for me in a small house where a fire burned day and night. That winter was cold, but there were moments when I thought my body was on fire, and then there were times when I shivered as if I were bedded in ice even though the fire roared in its stone hearth so fiercely that it scorched the roof beams. I could not eat. I grew weak. I woke in the night, and sometimes I thought of Gisela and of my lost children, and I wept. Ragnar told me I raved in my sleep, but I do not remember that madness, only that I was convinced I would die and so I made Brida tie my hand to Wasp-Sting’s hilt.

Brida brought me infusions of herbs in mead, she spooned honey into my mouth, and she made certain that the small house was guarded against Skade’s malevolence. “She hates you,” she told me one cold night when the wind pulled at the thatch and bellied the leather curtain which served as a door.

“Because I didn’t give her any silver?”

“Because of that.”

“There was no hoard,” I said, “not as she described it.”

“But she denies cursing you.”

“What else can have caused this?”

“We tied her to a post,” Brida said, “and showed her the whip. She swore she had not cursed you.”

“She would,” I said bitterly.

“And she still denied it when her back was bloody.”

I looked at Brida, dark-eyed, her face shadowed by her wild black hair. “Who used the whip?”

“I did,” she said calmly, “and then I took her to the stone.”

“The stone?”

She nodded eastward. “Across the river, Uhtred, is a hill, and on the hill is a stone. A big one, planted upright. It was put there by the ancient people and it has power. The stone has breasts.”

“Breasts?”

“It’s shaped that way,” she said, momentarily cupping her hands over her own small breasts. “It’s tall,” she went on, “even taller than you, and I took her there at night and lit fires to the gods, and put skulls in a ring, and I told her I would summon the demons to turn her skin yellow and her hair white and to make her face wrinkled and her breasts sag and her back humped. She cried.”

“Could you have done all that?”

“She believed so,” Brida said with a sly smile, “and she promised me on her life she had not cursed you. She spoke true, I’m sure.”

“So it’s just a fever?”

“More than a fever, a sickness. Others have it. Two men died last week.”

A priest came each week and bled me. He was a morose Saxon who preached his gospel in the small town that had appeared just to the south of Ragnar’s fortress.

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