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[heft] Perry Rhodan 2581 Wund Leo Lukas
Boulevard . ossements Leo Malet
Duivel.in.het.zwart.Conrad.Kobb
Conrad, Dav
brighids quest cast pc
Augusta Li Neskaya
BeyondReckless.PDF Ava March
Dragonlance chronicles by Margaret Weis
Celebracion en el club de los v Kate Jacobs
An Honorable Man Edward Kendrick

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.Then a knight came up with a pen and a horn of indelible ink and wrote the number above the door on the back of ourleft hand, one of us at a time."This is where you live," he said patiently to each of us."When you get lost, come back here."I nodded mutely.It was as though I was surrounded by a fog, and that fog would not lift for months.I did what I was told, and they kept me amazingly busy.Wemarched in step with one another for many mind-numbinghours.We endlessly repeated the same awkward motionswith pikes, knives, and axes, until somehow they became less awkward.We ate together, sang together, and prayed together.Overthe weeks, we were armed and armored, but we were all disap-pointed when we were issued axes as our secondary weaponsrather than swords.Captain Targ explained that the sword was a hard weaponto master.Skill with one took years to develop, and we had only four months before the Mongols would arrive.On the other hand, everybody had chopped firewood.We alreadyknew how to use an axe.The problem, as far as we grunts were concerned, was thatan axe is a peasant's weapon, whereas the sword was theweapon, even the symbol, of a nobleman.Sir Odon said that we would learn about swords after thewar, when we all came back for the other eight months ofthe Warrior's School.Furthermore, our primary weapons werethe two-yard-long halberds that the first lance used, the six-yard-long pikes that the second, third, fourth, and fifth lancescarried, and most important, the swivel guns that the sixthfired.Swords, axes, and knives were really unimportant.We grunts would still have been much happier with swordsthan with the axes we were given.Somehow, though I was never quite sure when or how, I learned how to take care of my equipment, how to answer properly to my superiors, how to fight with my weapons.Ifelt my muscles getting bigger, my hands getting harder, mywaist getting smaller.They had to adjust my armor threetimes to fit the changing me.They yelled at me, gesticulated, and swore at me as no oneever had before, but eventually I ceased to be troubled by it.They chewed my ass so many times that after a while all theycould get was scar tissue.What I did not ever do was find my father, or my brother,or indeed anybody at all that I had ever known before.Isearched, but I never found them.In school, back home, they had taught me a bit aboutprobabilities, and I tried to compute the possibility of findingmy family and friends.At Okoitz, I must have known—what?—two hundred men? Here in Hell, they told me therewere a sixth of a million of us.If I saw a hundred men outsideof those in my own company every day, how long should it be before I saw a single familiar face? I worked it out againand again and rarely got the same number twice, but itseemed that it could not possibly take as long as it was taking.The company kept records on those of us who belongedto it, but there were no central records for the entire army.There was no one who could tell me where in this huge city—the largest in Christendom, they told us—my father andbrother were.They had tried to keep such records once, but as the army grew, the task became impossible.Sir Odon said that maybe after we won the war, we would have time for such things.Idid not find this to be comforting.I often wrote to my mother, and I was sure she was writingto me, but the mails were all fouled up.Delivering them wasone of the things the army did in times of peace, and I could understand we had other priorities now.In four months I gotonly two letters from her, and neither of them seemed to contain any answers to my questions, like "What is my father's address?"The fact that she had my address meant she must havegotten at least one letter from me, and surely my father musthave written to her as well! All I could think was that perhapsmy questions had all been answered in some earlier, undeliv-ered letter.Yet all things fade, including the loneliness in my heartand the fog that surrounded my head.Slowly, I began to takenotice of the other men in my lance, in my platoon, in my company.I began to realize I had new friends now, and insome ways they were better than those I had left behind.At least they were more interesting, none of them beingbakers.The fellow in the bunk above me, Zbigniew, had worked onLord Conrad's ranch, where they had a large herd of slightlydomesticated aurochs.He had been one of the Pruthenianchildren Lord Conrad had rescued from the Crossmen.The guy in the bunk below, Lezek, came from the neigh-boring ranch where all of Anna's children were raised untilthey reached their fourth year.At that age, they somehow "remembered" everythingthat their mother had known up to the time they were con-ceived, even though there wasn't a stallion involved in theirprocreation.Unlike people and just about everything else in the world, Anna and her children had offspring whenever they wantedand did it without the help of the opposite sex.In fact, the op-posite sex didn't exist for their species, a thing that mademost of the men in my lance claim to feel sorry for them.You see, sex was a subject that was often discussed amongus, though I suspected my lance mates had as little realknowledge of the subject as I did.In any event, Lezek was impressed with the fact that I hadknown Anna herself since I was six years old, and he ques-tioned me for days about every incident I knew of concerningher.Even though his father had worked with the Big People for years, no one he knew had actually talked for any lengthwith Anna herself.While there were only twenty-nine adult Big People at thatpoint, there were three hundred sixty-four young ones at the ranch, managed by a young woman named Kotcha, whom I vaguely remembered.Once, she had lived a few doors down from my family's house.Lezek said that in ten years there would be twenty-fourthousand adult Big People, and ten years after that everybodywould have one.I'm not sure if anyone believed him, butthat's what he said.The other three men in our lance were less talkative, sincenone of them spoke much Polish.Fritz was a German who came from a farm not far from Worms.He could read and write our language well, since he had been reading Lord Conrad's magazine every month for five years, but his pronunciation still left much to be desired [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]