"Mitchell Smith - Kingdom River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

thought I had another day or two to walk to Better-Weather, but then I saw your camp, and said to
myself, 'Ah — there's been fighting! So surely there the Captain-General will be.' " She made a little
curtsy as a lady might have done south, in the Emperor's court, then took a fold of heavy white
parchment from her coat, and handed it to him.
"I'm instructed to serve the Lord Small-Sam Monroe as the voice of New England, at his pleasure
of course. Ambassadress." The girl dwelt on the final s's and made a sudden face of glee.
"From McAllen?"
"No, lord. Second-cousin Louis is superseded. I come down from Harvard Yard directly to you…
Poor old Cousin Louis; he'll be furious." She spoke a very elegant book-English.
"I see."
There was a spatter of dried blood down her long blue coat.
She saw him notice it. "Travel stains of the travel weary — I walked all the way down."
Walked, Sam thought, and walked in the air.... Still, from Boston-in-the-Ice to North
Map-Mexico — alone and in however many weeks — was remarkable. And New England's first
mistake, to let him know she was remarkable. They should have sent her by ship.
He read — in black squid ink on fine-scraped hide — the submission of Patience Nearly-Lodge
Riley's service as go-between (and Voice of the Cambridge Faculty and Town Meeting) to 'the person
Small-Sam Monroe, presently Captain-General of North Map-Mexico'…. The 'presently' being a good
touch.
"Am I accepted?" She had a girl's fluting voice, as free of vibration as a child's.
"For the present." 'The present' being a good touch.
"Then, my baggage?" the ambassadress pointed up into the air. "So, soon I will be out of my stained
coat."
"Call the thing down," Sam said, and raised his voice to the troops. "Stand still, and keep silent!" The
shouting hurt his head.
The girl looked up, put two fingers into her mouth, and whistled as loud as he'd ever heard it done.
That hurt his head, too.
From high… high above, came a distant hooting, a mournful, uneasy sound. The troops shifted in the
sunshine, and sergeants called them to order. They were looking up at what slowly circled down, sweep
by sweep on great wings, making its low worried noises.
Sam didn't look up. Margaret Mosten watched the Boston girl.
Slow sweeps, slow descending, so the girl put her head back and whistled again. Sam's head
throbbed. Fucking vodka — and the wrong day to have drunk it.
Then the thing came swooping in, wings sighing… the sighs turning to thumps of air as it beat the
hilltop's wind to slow… hang almost stationary over their heads in heavy flappings, and finally — as the
girl stamped her booted foot and pointed at the ground — come down in a collapse and folding of great
bat's wings. It folded them once, then again, so it fell forward on what should have been elbows, and
crouched huge, hunched, and puffing from exertion or uneasiness. Its body was pale and freckled —
smooth skin, no fur — its neck long, wattled, and odd. But it was the head made the troops murmur, no
matter what the sergeants ordered.
Sam stayed standing close by an effort, and looked at a toothed thin-lipped jaw almost long as a
man's arm, a round bare bulge of skull with human ears, and eyes a suffering woman's tragic and beautiful
blue. A pair of little shrunken breasts dangled from the creature's chest.
The Boston girl went to the thing, made soothing puh-puh noises to it, and began to unbuckle its
heavy harness. The wide leather straps were difficult to deal with, stiff with wetting and drying.
Sam stepped beside her — heard Margaret grunt behind him — and leaned against the thing's
flank, warm and massive as a charger's, to work a big buckle free. The creature smelled of human sweat,
its skin smooth from crease to crease, and damp with the effort of flying.
"What have you done?" he said, not a question he would have asked without the vodka.
But the girl understood him.