"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 07 - Days of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

January found an empty wharf and walked out along it, the stink of the river pungent in his nose with a
thou-sand memories. Hereabouts, where the river bent, the cur-rent was ferocious.

He didn't think it would take him long to drown.

He could barely see the wharf's end when he reached it. Occasional heat-lightning outlined the sable
clouds of trees on the opposite riverbank, but illuminated nothing nearer. He'd advanced feeling his way
with his feet-an ab-surd precaution, he thought, with the part of his mind still aware of the world of the
living: wasn't the point of his coming here tonight to walk off the end of the wharf in the dark?

But when he reached the end he only stood there, looking out into the blackness, with the electric
whisper of far-off storm-winds passing like silk ribbons over his face. Whether he would have jumped he
still didn't know.

He knew-even three years later-that he'd been close to it.
 But behind him he heard music, the light sweet em-broideries of a single violin, playing a Mozart air in
the dark.

And he turned back.

A white man was sitting on a bollard about halfway be-tween the wharf's end and the levee behind
them, a thin man of medium height whose long dark hair hung straggling over his shoulders like a
disheveled mermaid's. He played like an angel, dismissed from the Heavenly Choir, for drunkenness,
perhaps, because a squat black bottle of gin sat on the wharf-planks at his feet. He didn't look up as
January came back toward him out of the night, only em-bellished the little dance-tune till it sparkled,
calling secret rhythm and resonance from it until it seemed to speak of all joy, all light, all life.

He hadn't been there when January had walked out onto the wharf. He must have followed him, and
sat down to play.

Then he looked up at January with the darkest eyes January had ever seen, and said: "You look like a
man who needs a drink."

He was the first white man since January's return to his home city who had addressed him as a man,
and not some lower form of life. When January had departed in 1817 the town had been mostly French,
and the Creole French had long ago come to accommodation with their half-African libre cousins who
made up most of the town's free-colored community. To Americans, who seemed to have taken over the
town in their thousands, all blacks were potential slaves.

January said, "I do."

The fiddler nudged the battle at his feet with the toe of one battered boot. "Try this. They lie, who say
drafts from the River Styx bring oblivion. Who knows what dreams may come, when we have
shuffled off this mortal coil . . ."

Aye, there's the rub," January had agreed, and bent to pick up the bottle. He answered in the English
in which the fiddler had addressed him, the white man's voice not the twangy rasp of all those Americans
who had told him all those things that a nigger couldn't do these days, and who had asked him for his free
papers, to prove he had the right to walk around by himself rather, it had the slight lilt of the educated