"R. A. MacAvoy - L3 - The Belly of the Wolf" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

a festive, sweet-biscuit note to the air, and beneath that odor something of the feeling of the forest floor in
autumn. I knelt beside the chair to look at her closely. “But you, little academician. You are all right?”
Navvie’s hair is black and thick and her eyelashes so profuse as to make her eyes seem smudged.
Set within these ovals of darkness are eyes of a blue as pale as my own. Her glance is like clear sky
glimpsed through black weather. My own mother I saw only once that I remember, and that time was in
a dream of some sort. Yet Nahvah looks remark-ably like that dream-image, even to her littleness.
“I am reasonably all right,” she said. “But—
though he was your friend, Papa, he was my own godfather. I knew him all my life.”
Godfathers can be important relations, or trivial ones. Rudof took his godfatherhood very seriously.
We had many arguments over the matter of gifts. Sometimes I won, but there was a closet of rich dresses
at the statehouse in Velonya that Navvie wore only to visit the king. They embarrassed her. She would
not have to wear them again.
I sat at her feet, my chin on my knees, slightly faint from the odor of the herbs and the exhaustion of
sorrow. From this level I could see that Navvie was wearing her pistol in her waistband. Usually she
stuffed it in her purse.
“He told me to call him ‘uncle.’ I was six years old, but already I knew that was dangerous, because
the other children in the court grew jealous.”
“Children were not exactly the problem, but you were right, dear. It was dangerous.”
“So I never called him that when there were other people in the room, and he didn’t correct me. So
he must have known, too. That it wasn’t a good idea. After a year or so, I pretended to forget.”
“So did he,” I answered her, though Rudof had never told me of this. “But he would have liked to
have a daughter. Or a son that loved him.”
Navvie sighed and her hand sought out the pis-tol’s butt. “I think he was easier to love as a
godfa-ther than, he would have been as a father. So. What are we to do now?”
It was Arlin’s gift to change mood so smoothly from the painful to the practical that my mind would
stumble, trying to keep up. Navvie has taken , on a lot of her mother’s traits, now that she is grown. I
still—stumble to keep up.—
I pointed at the pistol. “Do you think Rudofs death affects our security, girl? Down here in Can-ton?”
“There is no security,” she replied, quoting Powl, whom she can barely remember. “Not anywhere
on this earth. But I am carrying this because the new barrel is promised for today. I am to be at the
smith’s this afternoon.”
As I stood up I slipped the pistol away from her and looked it over. “Were you planning to exchange
the barrels with a shot in the chamber?”
Navvie put out her hand and I gave the thing back to her. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Navvie. If
the day feels like that to you, keep the pistol loaded. My own feelings are too discorded for use.”
—
We took our midday at one of Canton’s coffee and pastry shops, which are far superior to the inns
of my home, except that they serve a bad beer., Until Navvie mentioned the fact, I did not notice I had
not eaten my dinner at all. I remember being amazed at this, and wondering whether somehow the waiter
had changed my plate for a joke. I wrapped the pie in a clean handkerchief, and if I recall correctly,
threw it out two days later when I encountered it in my coat pocket.
The day’s inertia took us to the smithy afterward. Gunsmithery is another aspect in which Canton
leaves the North behind.
I am old enough to have no feeling for guns. The two-man harquebus of my youth was as like to
blow off the head of the wielder as that of his opponent. And also, back at Sordaling School, we were
taught a gun was no weapon for an officer, let alone gentry or knight. But the rough tools of my youth
bear little resemblance to Navvie’s pistols.
She has had always an affinity for powder-weapons, which she got neither from Arlin nor my-self.
Perhaps it is her slightness and lack of reach that makes a, pistol more appealing to Navvie than a sword,
or brawling hand-to-hand. Perhaps the noise, speed, and violence of the things make a bal-ance with the