"LeGuin-Olders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

"Thank you," said the Farmwife, perhaps only partly understanding, gazing only
at the set, still face on the pillow. She was trembling a little.

"You're cold, dema," Hamid said gently and respectfully. "You should get
dressed."

"Is he warm enough? Was he chilled, in the boat? I can have the fire laid--"

"No. He's warm enough. It's you I speak of, dema."

She glanced at him a little wildly, as if seeing him that moment. "Yes," she
said. "Thank you."

"I'll come back in a little while," he said, laid his hand on his heart, and
quietly went out, closing the massive door behind him.

He went across to the kitchen wing and demanded food and drink for a starving
man, a thirsty man leg-cramped from crouching in a damned boat all night. He was
not shy, and was used to the authority of his calling. It had been a long
journey overland from the city, and then poling through the marshes, with Broad
Isle the only hospitable place to stop among the endless channels, and the sun
beating down all day, and then the long dreamlike discomfort of the night. He
made much of his hunger and travail to amuse his hosts and to divert them, too,
from asking questions about how the Husbandman did and would do. He did not want
to tell them 'more than the man's wife knew.

But they, discreet or knowing or respectful, asked no direct questions of him.
Though their concern for Farre was plain, they asked only, by various
indirections, if he was sure to live, and seemed satisfied by that assurance. In
some faces Hamid thought he saw a glimpse of something beyond satisfaction: a
brooding acceptance in one; an almost conniving intelligence in another. One
young fellow blurted out, "Then will he be--" and shut his mouth, under the
joined stares of five or six older people. They were a trapmouthed lot, the
Sandry Islanders. All that were not actively young looked old: seamed,weather
beaten, brown skin wrinkled and silvery, hands gnarled, hair thick, coarse, and
dry. Only their eyes were quick, observant. And some of them had eyes of an
unusual color, like amber; Pask, his wife Dyadi, and several others, as well as
Farre himself. The first time Hamid had seen Farre, before the coma deepened, he
had been struck by the strong features and those light, clear eyes. They all
spoke a strong dialect, but Hamid had grown up not far inland from the marshes,
and anyhow had an ear for dialects. By the end of his large and satisfying
breakfast he was glottal-stopping with the best of them.

He returned to the great bedroom with a well-loaded tray. As he bad expected,
the Farmwife, dressed and shod, was sitting close beside the bed, her hand lying
lightly on her husband's hand. She looked up at Hamid politely but as an
intruder: please be quiet, don't interrupt us, make him be well and go away. . .
. Hamid had no particular eye for beauty in women, perhaps having seen beauty
too often at too short a distance, where it dissolves; but he responded to a
woman's health, to the firm sweet flesh, the quiver and vigor of full life. And