"China Mieville - Iron Council" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

On the second day out, in the grey waves of the Meagre Sea, Cutter’s party hijacked the Akif. Pomeroy held a pistol at the captain’s head. The crew stared in disbelief.
Elsie and Ihona raised their guns. Cutter watched Elsie’s hand shake. Fejh reared out of his water-barrel with a bow. The captain began to cry.
“We’re taking a diversion,” Cutter said. “It’s going to take you a few extra days to get to Shankell. We’re going southwest first. Along the coast. Up the Dradscale
River. You’ll make Shankell a few days late, is all. And minus a bit of stock.”
The crew of six men sulked and surrendered their weapons. They were all casuals on a daily rate: they had no solidarity with each other or their captain. They looked at
Fejhechrillen hatefully, out of some prejudice.
Cutter tied the captain to the wheel, by the dehorned sables the Akif carried, and the travellers took turns to menace him while the mounts watched. His blubbering was
embarrassing. The sun grew harsher. Their wake widened as if they unbuckled the water. Cutter watched Fejh suffer in the hot salt air.
They saw the north shores of the Cymek on the third day. Merciless baked-clay hills, dust and sandtraps. There were scraps of plantlife: dust-coloured marram, trees of
hard and alien nature, spicate foliage. The Akif churned past brine marshes.
“He always said this would be the only way to get to Iron Council,” Cutter said.
The minerals of the Dradscale estuary made lustre on the water. The brackish slough was full of weed, and Cutter gave a city-dweller’s gape to see a clan of manatees
surface and graze.
“Is no safe,” said the helmsman. “Is with—” He gave some obscenity or disgust-noise, and pointed at Fejh. “Up farther. Full of riverpig.”
Cutter tensed at the word. “On,” he said, and pointed his gun. The pilot moved back.
“We no do,” he said. Abruptly he tilted backward over the rail and into the water. Everyone moved and shouted.
“There.” Pomeroy pointed with his revolver. The pilot had surfaced and was heading for one of the islands. Pomeroy tracked him but never fired.
“Godsdammit,” he said as the man reached the little shore. “Only reason the others haven’t gone after him is they can’t swim.” He nodded at the cheering crew.
“They’ll fight back with their fucking hands if we push this,” Ihona said. “Look at them. And you know we won’t shoot them. You know what we have to do.”
So in ridiculous inversion, the hijackers ferried the crew to the island. Pomeroy waved his gun as if carrying out necessary punishment. But they let the sailors off, and
even gave them provisions. The captain watched plaintively. They would not let him go.
Cutter was disgusted. “Too fucking soft,” he raged at his friends. “You shouldn’t have come if you’re so soft.”
“What do you suggest, Cutter?” Ihona shouted. “You make them stay if you can. You ain’t going to kill them. No, maybe we shouldn’t have come, it’s already cost us.”
Pomeroy glowered. Elsie and Fejh would not look at Cutter. He was suddenly fearful.
“Come on,” Cutter said. He tried not to sound wheedling or scornful. “Come on. We’re getting there. We’ll find him. This bloody journey’ll end.”
“For someone so known not to give a damn,” Ihona said, “you’re risking a lot for this. You want to be careful, people might think you ain’t what you like to think.”

The Dradscale was wide. Ditches and sikes joined it, channelling in dirty water. It was unbending for miles ahead.
On the east bank, dry hills rose behind the mangroves, wind-cut arids. It was a desert of cooked mud, and way beyond it was Shankell, the cactus city. On the west the
land was altogether harsher. Above the fringe of tidal trees was a comb of rock teeth. A zone of vicious karst, an unbelievable thicket of edged stone. By Cutter’s
imprecise documents it stretched a hundred miles. His maps were scribbled with explorers’ exhortations. Devils’ nails said one, and another Three dead. Turned back.
There were birds, high-shouldered storks that walked like villains. They flew with languid wingstrokes as if always exhausted. Cutter had never suffered in so brute a
sun. He gaped in its light. All of them were pained by it, but Fejh of course most of all, submerging again and again in his stinking barrel. When eventually the water
around them was saltless he dived with relief and refilled his container. He did not swim long: he did not know this river.
The man they followed must have been a vector of change. Cutter watched the riverbanks for signs that he had passed.
They steamed through the night, announcing themselves with soot and juddering. In the hard red light of dawn the leaves and vines dandled in the current seemed to
deliquesce, to be runoff streams of dye, matter adrip into meltwater.
While the sun was still low the Dradscale widened and bled into a pocosin. The marsh-lake was met by the end of the karst, uncanny fingerbones of stone. The Akif
slowed. For minutes, its motor was the only sound.
“Where now, Cutter?” someone said at last.
Something moved below the water. Fejh leaned up half out of his barrel.
“Dammit, it’s—” he said but was interrupted.
Things were surfacing ahead of the Akif, broad-mouthed heads. Vodyanoi bravos waving spears.
The captain came upright and shrieked. He shoved down on his throttle, and the water-bandits scattered and dived. Fejh upset his barrel, spilling dirty water. He leaned
out and yelled in Lubbock at the vodyanoi below, but they did not answer.
They came up again, burst out of the water and for a moment were poised as if they stood upon it. They threw spears before they fell. Spumes of water arced from
below their outflung arms so that their shafts became harpoons, riding it. Cutter had never seen such watercræft. He fired into the water.
The captain was still accelerating. He was going to drive the Akif onto the shore, Cutter realised. There was no time to moor.
“Brace!” he shouted. With a huge grinding the boat rode the shallow bank. Cutter pitched over the prow and landed hard. “Come on!” he said, rising.
The Akif jutted like a ramp. The antelopes’ pen had broken and, tethered to one another, they were hauling off in a dangerous mass of hooves and hornstubs. Fejh