The Mist and the Lightning. Part 19 - страница 19



Barely overcoming disgust, Kors cautiously stepped into the liquid mud, mixed with hay and dung. Afraid of injuring his feet on some loose horseshoe nail or broken bottle, he took a few steps forward. The edges of his trouser legs were already wet and dirty. Probably, it was necessary to immediately pull them up or roll them up, but then he would look even stupider. Where’s his damn horse, fucking Grrkh? Kors called out to him loudly, immediately hearing a whinny in response from quite a distance away. He quickly passed several low tents. Smoke curled over them, for sure there were housekeeping Verniy and Valentine there, maybe even at that moment they were boiling water for Kors. But Kors didn’t want to see them, and even more didn’t want them to see him in such a pitiful state. He found Grrkh tied up under a rectangular canopy set up on tall poles. His horse stood calmly next to Unclean Power and Beauty. In addition to the fact that a roof was built for the horses, protecting them from the rain, Grrkh was unsaddled and carefully covered with a woolen blanket. Next to him, on a clean pallet, lay hay and a bucket filled to the brim with water. “The horse is treated better than me!” Kors thought angrily. He looked around for his saddle, but couldn’t find it, there was not a single saddle at all. It looked like Verniy had taken all the saddles and harness to his tent, away from dampness and rain. “The horses are well-groomed, and there is more order here than in the tent of Nik and Arel! Only you always have dirt, cold and a mess! Well, go to hell!” Still being angry, Kors roughly pulled off the blanket from the horse and jumped on him without a saddle, feeling a strong shiver ran through Grrkh’s body from the scruff of the neck to the tail. The horse twitched under the rider, and neighed, nervously stepping with his hooves, but Kors paid no attention to this. Yelling a command furiously and kicking the horse’s flanks with his muddy heels, he urged him onward to where he had come from the day before, and where his Parky and Adrian had been.

Responding to the call, Parky jumped out of his tent, and, since Kors took him by surprise, the unclean one couldn’t restrain his emotions, and admiration flashed in his eyes for just a second. Kors noticed this and understood the reason. Yes, the camisole was really luxurious, but Parky couldn’t realize the fact that wearing it in such a situation was inappropriate, just like Nick, and by the way, all the other unclean couldn’t either. And the fact that Kors was wearing expensive clothes, but at the same time had bare feet in the mud, didn’t seem strange to Parky at all.

Kors dismounted. The fact that he was without shoes was incredibly depressing to him.

“Parky! Set up my tent immediately! You have five minutes!”

“Yes, commander! I can suggest you, commander, to take shelter in my tent for the time being. It’s raining.”

Kors didn’t want to go into the unclean’s tent at all, but standing there like a fool in front of his subordinates was also a dubious option.

“All right, just move quicker!”

Kors entered his captain’s tent. To his relief, it was fairly clean and comfortable inside. A table and chairs stood against one wall, and a sleeping place was located at the other, it was a low flooring littered with skins. Tyutya was sitting on it, cross-legged. Undressed, with her bright hair disheveled, she looked in horror at Kors, and he looked at her terrible burn scars in place of her breast and a deep vertical scar on her stomach. “What kind of pervert do you have to be, Parky, to want that?” Kors thought, and, apparently, disgust was involuntarily reflected on his face, because the slave, coming to her senses, grabbed her dress, put it on very quickly, threw on the cape in a matter of seconds and rushed out of the tent. Kors sat down at the table and, taking Parky’s cigarette from the box lying on it, lit it. He heard that there was a fuss in the street, the cries of the unclean, Parks was giving out jerky commands.