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

Past the rocks the road turned, falling away steeply be-fore him into dry abysses of yellow air that
seemed to mag-nify everything like crystal. He saw below him a long dun landscape splodged with thorny
green, broken here and there with anemic trees, feathery with autumn. Mountains gouged the sky
southward to his left, black rock meringued with marble white, trailing drifts of white smoke. Farther off
to the south and west the noon sky glared silver in sheets of water, fringed with green that was darker
still.

January felt he could see every tile of every roof of the city that rose, it seemed, from the heart of the
lake, red and blue and gilt;, could name every horse and cow, every burro and child and pig in the
thatch-roofed villages that lay be-tween dry rangeland and endless, gleaming acres of bird--skimmed
marsh. Could distinguish every voice of those multi-tongued bells one from another as they sent forth
over the lands their eternal message: each soul, no matter whose, is equally cherished, equally precious in
the sight of God.

Behind him he heard cursing-German, English, Spanish-and the jangle of harness-ware. A long whip
cracked as the men righted the coach. He supposed he should go back. Padre Cesario would need his
arm looked at before the wound turned nasty. And it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that the
bandits would return, and he was out of sight of the others. But for a long time he only stood, looking
down over that high, barren valley, watch-ing the geese and the ducks, the hawks and the vultures, free
as the angels of Death in the jeweled air.
 TWO

Once they reached Mexico City itself, it took them hours to get inside.

Lake and marshland surrounded it. After a night in abominable accommodations in the village at the
foot of the pass, they spent most of the morning tearing along at top speed between sheets of water
prickled with reeds, coming at last to one of the causeways raised by the Indians from whom the Spanish
had stolen the land. These cause-ways being the only means to cross the marsh, they were the ideal
places for the government to set up customs barri-ers and extract tolls from those bringing
merchandise-or anything else-into the city, with predictable results.

Familiar for years with the customs barriers around Paris and their jam of carriages, carts,
pack-animals, and basket-toting vendors all waiting to be passed by the bored and overworked
bureaucrats of the customs-house, January minded the wait less than some members of the party. But
even Dillard, though he muttered about how Old Hickory would deal with tariffs, by God, didn't seem
surprised.

By which January deduced the man from Tennessee had been in Mexico City before.

He could only be glad that they'd decided to have the valet Da Ponte buried at the church at the
mountain pass yesterday afternoon. Otherwise the customs inspectors would almost certainly have levied
duty on the body. Besides the enormous lines of ox-carts, coaches, burros laden with charcoal and
firewood, and herds of long-horned cattle and grunting swine, there were unexpected numbers of soldiers
on the causeway, even for a country that had been in a state of internal warfare, on and off, for the past
twenty-five years. When January asked his fellow--passenger Herr Groellich about it, the German
replied, "Had you not heard, then? Every day new levies come in from the countryside, from as far off as
the Yucatan. Generalissimo Santa Anna gathers his Army of Operations, the greatest army of the world,
he says, to march north and punish the rebellious Americans who have seized the province of Texas."