"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down the River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

behind the levee, dodging in and out among the brown-leaved sycamores; a market woman in a
red-and-purple-striped tignon shouted a good-natured reproof. A few yards farther the hoop
bounded out of control, startling a pair of horses being led down the gangplank of the small stern-
wheeler Belle Dame: a carriage team by the look of them--from somewhere in the bayous of the
Barataria country, to judge from the narrow lines of the boat, the single wheel and shallow draft-
matched blacks with white stockings, as if they'd waded in paint.
The nearer horse reared, plunging in fear, and the man in charge of them, tall and fair with a
mouth like the single stroke of a pen, dragged brutally on the animal's bit to pull it down. For
good measure he added a cut across the hocks with his whip, and turned just in time to see the
black boy dart to retrieve his hoop, the white playmate at his heels. The fair man's whip licked
out, caught the black boy across the face.
The child staggered back, clutching his cheek. Blood poured from between his fingers. His white
friend skidded to a halt, stood staring, mouth open, as the man turned away, cursing and lashing
at the frightened horses again. He did not even look back as he jerked them toward the blue
shadows of Rue Chartres.
The white boy picked up the hoop. He looked at his friend again, in an agony of uncertainty
about what sort of support or comfort he should give or should be seen to give. In the end he ran
away crying, leaving his playmate to bleed and weep alone.
"Ben."
January turned his head. His sister Olympe stood next to Rose's chair.
January had two sisters. The elder, born two years later than himself, was the daughter of that
fellow-slave whom his mother never mentioned: the tall man with tribal scars on his face who
sometimes walked in January's dreams. The younger, Dominique, was St.Denis Janvier's child,
their mother's lace-trimmed princess. Dominique had been only four when January had left for
Paris to study medicine eighteen years ago. Dominique, January had long ago noticed, came and
went through their mother's bedroom-which opened onto Rue Burgundy, in the accepted Creole
fashion-as a matter of course.
Since her departure to join the voodoos at the age of sixteen, Olympe had not entered their
mother's house at all.
"It's good to see you." With her awkward, wadingbird grace, Rose moved her rough wooden
chair aside to make room, and January brought over another of the several dozen seats scattered
around among the tables in the shelter of the arcade. People generally bought coffee from one of
the stands in the market and brought it here to sit, but the woman who ran the nearest stand came
to the table before anyone went to her, with a cup for Olympe as she was sitting down, and had to
be pressed two or three times to take the picayune payment for it.
That was what it was, January supposed, to be a voodoo.
"I hear Simon Fourchet asked you to find the one who wants to kill him," said Olympe.
She was tall for a woman, as January was tall for a man, and like her brother coal black: beau
noir lustre, the dealers called that ebon African shininess. She wore a skirt of bright-hued calico,
yellow and red, like the market women, and a jacket of purple wool. Strings of cowrie shells and
the vertebrae of snakes circled her neck and wound in the folds of the scarlet tignon that hid her
hair, giving her the voodoo name of Olympia Snakebones. When St.-Denis Janvier had bought
Livia and her two children from Simon Fourchet, he'd paid to have them tutored in proper
French, which after his years in Paris January spoke without thinking. Olympe, on the other hand,
had kept her rough African habits of speech through all her teachers' beatings, sliding le and la
into a single all-purpose li and casually slurring and dropping the beginnings and endings of
words, as if she took pride in speaking like a field hand. Perhaps she did.
"If Fourchet's looking for one who wants to kill him, he doesn't have to walk farther than the
quarters on his own land," snapped January. He was getting tired of everyone's opinions on a
subject that he himself considered closed.