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

through the dust. January ducked down, caught another rifle-Rose was loading-popped up, and fired.
"Where'd you learn to handle a gun, boy?" demanded Dillard, emerging like a gopher from the window
beside him. Anywhere in the United States it was illegal for a black man to own or use firearms. A bullet
plowed the window-frame near his hand, spraying splinters.

"Fighting for Jackson at New Orleans." January could almost hear the Tennessean's brain crunch as it
assimilated the hero-President's name. "British didn't run around like this, though." He fired, and a
looming horseback shape flung out its arms and fell.

"Sure is like tryin' to shoot weasels by starlight," Dillard agreed, and spat tobacco.

Behind the fallen coach the Indian guard yelled some-thing: January turned and got off a shot at more
ragged, wolf-like shapes clambering over the rocks above the road, heard another bullet strike the coach
roof. A man inside cried out. A rider loomed out of the dust, bloody spittle stringing from the barbed
Spanish bit in the horse's mouth. January glimpsed a scarred, bearded face as black as his own under the
wide-brimmed leather hat, the flash of silver on the pistol the man aimed down at him; Dillard's gun
roared in double thunder with the dark-faced bandit's. Both shots went wild, and in the next second the
coach driver sprang up almost under the hooves of the bandit's horse, swinging his empty rifle like a club,
while on the ground by the coach in a tangle of harness the two surviv-ing horses kicked, screamed,
thrashed.

The dark bandit wheeled, plunged into the dust, shouting "Vamanos, toros!" to his men. One
unhorsed ban-dit tried to mount a fallen comrade's horse, and Dillard coolly shot him in the back; the
animal whinnying, back-ing, reins tangled in a thicket of creosote-bush in the ditch beside the road. As
the bandits rode off, the Tennessean swung himself up through the coach window and went to get the
horse; January ducked down into the coach again. Strange, he thought, that one of the first men of African
blood that he'd seen in this country had been trying to kill him.

Then he smelled blood down in the coach and saw Rose with the breast of her dress all crimson with
gore.... She was knotting one of her hat-veils around a wound in Padre Cesario's wrist and the blood
clearly belonged to him-or to the poor valet Da Ponte, crumpled in a hud-dle-but the sight of it nearly
stopped January's heart.

It could have been Rose.

Like that, in a second, everything we could have had to-gether, all the years of our happiness, gone...

He began to shake, as if with malarial chill. "Are you all right?" He hoped his voice didn't sound as
hoarse to her as it did in his own ears.

She nodded. Her hands were black with powder and her long hair-beautiful walnut-brown and curly,
more like a white woman's than a black's-stuck with sweat to her face and hung down in strings where it
had escaped chignon and hat.

We're going back to New Orleans and to hell with Hannibal. ... YOU’RE going back to New
Orleans and Ill join you there after I've wrung his neck for him.... We’ll open the school on Rue
Esplanade and live happily ever after forever unless you get kidnapped by slave-traders or die in
another cholera epidemic or in childbirth. . . .

He drew a deep breath and looked around. "Anyone else hurt?"