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

The two merchants shook their heads. One of them bent over Da Ponte, tried to straighten him;
January and the other merchant opened the coach door above them like a trap-door, and gently helped
out first the priest, then Rose, then lifted out the valet's body. He was old and frag-ile and had spoken
only Italian; January wondered what he'd been doing in Mexico, and if he had family back in Locarno.
He'd been shot through the throat.

It could have been Rose.

Dillard and the guard came back, each leading a ban-dit's horse. The bandit January had shot lay
sobbing some distance from the coach. He'd been dragged, and then trampled, by his terrified mount.
Blood bubbled from his mouth and spread over the crotch of his thin, ragged peas-ant breeches. His
unshaven face contorted with agony; January fished his rosary from his pocket, knelt beside the man and
twined the blue glass beads, the battered steel cru-cifix in the filthy hands.

The bandit couldn't speak but brought the rosary up to his lips and kissed it.

"Your sins are forgiven you," whispered January in Spanish, and made the Sign of the Cross. Standing,
he took from his pocket the pistol he'd purchased in vera Cruz. "Go with God."

And shot him through the head.
 He was wiping the blood off his rosary when the Indian coach guard came over and said in Spanish,
"Don't waste your powder on such a one, Señor. El Moro may at-tack us again before we reach the
city."

"Sorry."

The other men were unharnessing the surviving horses, dragging the dead ones clear. Checking hocks,
knees, tendons. Already the sopilotes-the gray-headed black vultures-were circling, waiting for the living
to clear the hell away and let them eat. January heard, far off on the still, thin air, the ringing of
church-bells. It was Sunday, he remembered. They had climbed into the diligencia at two in the morning
in Perote, and he had been so sleepy, he had barely been able to murmur his prayers.

He walked a little distance from the coach with its scattered debris of luggage, hat-boxes, letters from a
burst mailsack, and the book one of the Germans had been reading, past the towering knee of gray rock
that had concealed the bandits' attack. He felt dizzy, with the sun's heat rising off the stone and the road
and the clear, brittle desolation of these oak-dotted mountains, but the air nonetheless steely with chill.

I've been in this country a week, he thought, and already I've killed a man.

He wondered if Hannibal was still alive at all.

Coming to Mexico, it had been in his heart to wonder about what it would be like where slavery had
been done away with, as the abolitionist Yankee driver had said. And now he knew.

Born a slave, for sixteen years of his manhood he'd lived in France in a world completely free. Free to
study medicine, free to study music, free to wed a woman he loved ... free of the ghastly burden of being
the black son of slaves in Louisiana that he had carried like a slab of stone all his life.

And he'd learned that freedom made no difference whatsoever when Death came calling.