"George R. R. Martin - Fevre Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

busy spooning up mock turtle soup from a china bowl. The cut of his long
black coat made it clear he was no riverman; an Easterner then, or maybe
even a foreigner. He was big, Marsh saw, though not near so big as Marsh;
seated, he gave the impression of height, but he had none of Marsh's girth.
At first Marsh thought him an old man, for his hair was white. Then, when
he came closer, he saw that it was not white at all, but a very pale blond,
and suddenly the stranger took on an almost boyish aspect. York was
clean-shaven, not a mustache nor side whiskers on his long, cool face, and
his skin was as fair as his hair. He had hands like a woman, Marsh thought
as he stood over the table.

He tapped on the table with his stick. The cloth muffled the sound, made it
a gentle summons. "You Josh York?" he said.
York looked up, and their eyes met.

Till the rest of his days were done, Abner Marsh remembered that moment,
that first look into the eyes of Joshua York. Whatever thoughts he had had,
whatever plans he had made, were sucked up in the maelstrom of York's
eyes. Boy and old man and dandy and foreigner, all those were gone in an
instant, and there was only York, the man himself, the power of him, the
dream, the intensity.

York's eyes were gray, startlingly dark in such a pale face. His pupils were
pinpoints, burning black, and they reached right into Marsh and weighed the
soul inside him. The gray around them seemed alive, moving, like fog on
the river on a dark night, when the banks vanish and the lights vanish and
there is nothing in the world but your boat and the river and the fog. In
those mists, Abner Marsh saw things; visions swift-glimpsed and then
gone. There was a cool intelligence peering out of those mists. But there
was a beast as well, dark and frightening, chained and angry, raging at the
fog. Laughter and loneliness and cruel passion; York had all of that in his
eyes.

But mostly there was force in those eyes, terrible force, a strength as
relentless and merciless as the ice that had crushed Marsh's dreams.
Somewhere in that fog, Marsh could sense the ice moving, slow, so slow,
and he could hear the awful splintering of his boats and all his hopes.
Abner Marsh had stared down many a man in his day, and he held his gaze
for the longest time, his hand closed so hard around his stick that he
feared he would snap it in two. But at last he looked away.
The man at the table pushed away his soup, gestured, and said, "Captain
Marsh. I have been expecting you. Please join me." His voice was mellow,
educated, easy.

"Yes," Marsh said, too softly. He pulled out the chair across from York and
eased himself into it. Marsh was a massive man, six foot tall and three
hundred pounds heavy. He had a red face and a full black beard that he
wore to cover up a flat, pushed-in nose and a faceful of warts, but even the
whiskers didn't help much; they called him the ugliest man on the river, and
he knew it. In his heavy blue captain's coat with its double row of brass