"Robin Hobb & Steven Brust - The Gypsy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hobb Robin)

of time later. Now, we are remembering the tambou-
rine, which is as perfect a match for the fiddle as the
onion is for the bacon, and the memory of the ear
and the tongue is forever, which is as it should be.
These things stay with a person, no matter how many
years have passed, or what paths he has trod. Once
those sounds are in his blood/ he can never forget—

Never forget—

Umm. . . .

Somewhere, perhaps half a mile to his left, a siren
divided the evening into sections. Why do they call them
sirens, he wondered. What sort of sailor would be at-
tracted to them? The question was rhetorical and ironic.
He wasn't worried. He had no reason to think the
siren was for him, so he continued to stroll down
Saint Thomas, which seemed to be the street where
appliance stores gathered, with a few grocers and li-
quor stores interleaved between them like the thick
cloth that keeps the pottery from breaking against it-
self when—

Umm. . . .

He had been a sailor once—twice? Something like
that. He remembered rope burns on his hands; end-
less buckets of fash soup; toothless, fair-haired men
with food in their beards shouting to him in Dutch;

salt water in his mouth; the sick-sweet smell of rum;

earplugs so the batteries wouldn't deafen him; scrap-
ing sounds of a too-small tool against an ugly green
metal hull; salt water in his mouth. He almost re-
membered meeting a small shark once/ but this could
have been a dream. He'd never met a siren, in any
case.

It was coming closer. He almost ducked into a
storefront from some urge to flee, but there was really



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Prologue 3