"China Mieville - The Tain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

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The Tain
China Miéville

The light was hard. It seemed to flatten the walls of London, to push down onto the pavement with real
weight. It was oppressive: it scoured colours of depth.

On the concrete river-walls of the south bank, a man was lying with his right hand over his face,
squinting up at the bleached sky through his fingers. Watching the business of clouds. He had been there
for some time, unmoving, supine on the wall top. It had rained for hours, intermittently, throughout the
night. The city was still wet. The man was lying in rainwater. It had soaked through his clothes.

He listened, but heard nothing of interest.

Over time he turned his head, still shielding his eyes, until he was looking down at the walkway to his
right, at the puddles. He watched them carefully, a little warily, as if they were animals.

Finally, he sat up and swung his legs down over the edge of the wall. The river was at his back, now. He
leaned forward until his head hung over the path and the dirty water that blotted it. He stared into the
minute ripples.

The puddle was directly below his face, and it was blank, as he had known it would be.

He looked closer, until he could see faint patterns. A veil, the ghosts of colours and shapes moved across
the thin skin of water: incomprehensible but not random, according to strange vagaries.

The man stood and walked away. Behind him the sunlight hit the Thames. It did not scatter: it did not
refract on the moving river into little stabs of light. It did other things.



He walked in the centre of the paths and pavements, in clear view. His pace was quick, but not panicked.
A shotgun bounced on his shoulder, and periodically he swung it round and carried it to his chest,
holding it as if it offered more comfort than defence.

The man crossed the river. He stopped in the shadows below the arc of Grosvenor Bridge, and
clambered up its girdered underside. Where it should have been a curve of shadows, the bridge was
punctured, broken by thick rays of light. The man wrestled through the holes in its structure that recent
events had left.

He emerged in a crater of railway lines. An explosion had spread broken bricks and sleepers in violent
concentric circles, and the metal rails had burst and buckled into a frozen splash. The man was
surrounded by them. He trudged past the bomb's punctuation, to where they became train lines again.

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