"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 02 - Commitment Hour" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

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James Alan Gardner

Commitment Hour
To Linda: Here's another novel you don't have to finish if I get hit by a bus.



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the usual gang of writers (Linda Carson, John McMullen, Dave Till) for providing initial
feedback as chapters came hot off the printer, and to Robert J. Sawyer, Richard Curtis, and Jennifer
Brehl who read the whole thing in one chunk. Thanks too to Shelley Goetze who told me the name of
that little bump at the back of your neck (while she was giving me ultrasound for a broken leg... but that's
another story).

Finally, thanks to Chris Blythe, Eric Bristow, Duncan Bristow, and Larry Hackman who first walked
with me from Tober Cove to Cypress Marsh. Death to quill pigs forever!




ONE

A Net for a Duck
The night before Commitment, I was down in the marsh with the frogs and the fish, sitting out the time on
a mud-crusted log and waiting for the gods to send me a duck.

I'd spent hundreds of hours in that marsh when I was young, practicing my violin. Elderly mosquitoes
may still tell their larvae about the human child who was so busy rehearsing arpeggios he didn't have time
to swat. Our village doctor claims I forced her to work daily from dawn to dusk, gathering and grinding
the herbs I needed for skin ointment when I came home each night. But back then, Cypress Marsh was
the only place the Elders of Tober Cove let me practice; they said if they let me play in town, the noise
would curdle milk.

Now that I was twenty, they'd stopped complaining. I'd become our cove's most gold-getting export:
shipped down-peninsula to weddings, harvest festivals and spring struts, earning five times as much as
any fisher or farmer. My foster father told me the Elders sometimes fought over which of them could take
the most credit for my success; but the real credit should go to the dragonflies who discovered that where
there's a violin, there are all the mosquitoes a bug can eat. They saved my blood and bone... and even
today, Cypress Marsh dragonflies come buzzing at the sound of violin music, like children hearing the
dinner bell.
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