"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Dust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

things said and done during their possession; the woman I talked to who had been possessed by
Ogu said she was perfectly aware of herself, but observing: craving cigars, for instance (which
Ogu loves, though the woman possessed was a nonsmoker), and rum.

Other voodoo terms:

vèvès-complex designs drawn on the ground to focus or summon the loa
hougan-voodoo priest or "king" in old New Orleans terminology
mambo-voodoo priestess or "queen"
gris gris-an amulet or charm
tricken bag--amulet made of several ingredients sewn together in a bag, usually a gris-gris of ill
luck or malice
wanga (or ouanga)-spell
wangateur or root-doctor--magician, sorcerer
congris-mixture of black-eyed peas and rice, a favored food of the loa
ONE

African drums in darkness sullen as tar.
Rossini's "Di tanti palpiti" unspooling like golden ribbon from the ballroom's open windows.
Church bells and thunder.
Benjamin January flexed his aching shoulders and thought, Rain coming. Leaning on the corner
of Colonel Pritchard's ostentatious house, he could smell the sharp scent in the hot weight of the
night, hear the shift in the feverish tempo of the crickets and the frogs. The dim orange glow of
an oil lamp fell through the servants' door beside him, tipping the weeds beyond the edge of the
yard with fire.
Then the air changed, a cool flash of silkiness on his cheek, and he smelled blood.
The drums knocked and tripped, dancing rhythms. Fairly close to the house, he thought. This far
above Canal Street the lots in the American suburb of St. Mary were large, and few had been
built on yet. Ten feet from kitchen, yard, and carriage house grew the native oaks and cypresses
of the Louisiana swamps, as they had grown for time beyond reckoning. January picked out the
voices of the drums, as on summer nights like this one in his childhood he'd used to tell frog from
frog. That light knocking would be a hand drum no bigger than a vase, played with fast-tripping
fingertips. The heavy fast thudding was the bamboula, the log drum-a big one, by the sound. The
hourglass-shaped tenor spoke around them, patted sharply on both sides.
One of the men on the plantation where January had been born had had one of those. He'd kept it
hidden in a black oak, back in the cipridre, the swamp beyond the cane fields. Forty years ago,
when the Spanish had ruled the land, for a slave to own a drum was a whipping offense.
"Not meaning to presume, sir." Aeneas, Colonel Pritchard's cook, stepped from the kitchen's
gold-lit arch and crossed the small yard to where January stood at the foot of the back gallery
stairs. "But I'd be getting back up to the ballroom were I you." A stout man of about January's
own forty-one years, the cook executed a diffident little half bow as he spoke. It was a tribute to
January's status as a free man, though the cook was far lighter of skin. "Colonel Pritchard's been
known to dock a man's pay, be he gone for more than a minute or two. I seen him do it with a
fiddle player, only the other week."
January sighed, not surprised. The kitchen's doors and windows stood wide to the sweltering
night, and the nervous glances thrown by the cook, the majordomo, and the white-jacketed waiter
toward the house every time one of them cracked a joke or consumed a tartlet that should have
gone on the yellow-flowered German china told its own story.
"Thank you." January drew his gloves from his coat pocket and put them on again, white kid and
thirty cents a pair, and even that movement caused bolts of red-hot lightning to shoot through his