No Truce with Kings/Ship of Shadows [antikvár]

PNG, Charlie! Give's a song!" 'Tay, Charlie!"The whole mess was drunk, and the junior officers at the far end of the table were only somewhat noisier than their seniors near the colonel. Rugs and hangings could not much muffle the racket, shouts, stamping boots, thump of fists on oak and clash of cups raised aloft, that rang from wall to stony wall. High up among shadows that hid the rafters they hung from, the regimental banners stirred in a draft, as if to join the chaos. Below, the light of bracketed lanterns and bellowing fireplace winked on trophies and weapons.Autumn comes early on Echo Summit, and it was storming outside, wind-hoot past the watchtowers and rain-rush in the courtyards, an undertone that walked through the buildings and down all corridors, as if the story were ,true that the unit's dead came out of the cemetery each September Nineteenth night and tried to join the celebration but hadIISSIOT! FflFool! Lushshsh!" hissed the cat and bit Spar somewhere. The fourfold sting of the eye teeth balanced the gut-wretchedness of his looming hangover, so that Spar's mind floated as free as his body in the blackness of Windrush, in which shone only a couple of running lights dim as churning dream-glow and infinitely distant as the Bridge or the Stern.The vision came of a ship with all sails set creaming through blue, wind-rufiled sea against a blue sky. The last two nouns were not obscene now. He could hear the whistle of the salty wind through shrouds and stays, its drumming against the taut sails, and the creak of the three masts and all the rest of the ship's wood.^What was wood? From somewhere came the answer: plastic alive-o.And what force flattened the water and kept it from breaking up into great globules and the ship from spinning away, keel over masts, in the wind?