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

"If we had a sudden alarm, Corporal, and you mounted to fight with that steel hanging loose on your
chest, then one good cut across it with a saber or battle-ax would break your ribs like pick-up sticks."
"Won't happen again, sir."
Sam walked on. The young commander had spoken — unheard, of course, by the hundreds of
dead buried beneath the hill. He wondered how many such disasters it would take, before the corporals
stopped saluting....
"About our guest, Margaret; I want people mindful that if she kills someone, I can only send her
away. And if someone kills her, it means difficulty with Boston. So, no attempted love-making, no insults
exchanged, no discourtesies, no duels on duty or on leave. Let the officers know that's an order."
"Too bad," Margaret said, "because it's going to be a temptation. What the fuck do those New
Englanders have in mind, sending us a girl like that?"
Sam stopped by his tent's entrance. "What they first had in mind, was to make us wonder what they
had in mind."
"Right."
"And Margaret, I thank you for not mentioning it was a bad beginning, for her to find me drunk....
Now, I need some sleep. And Lady Weather keep the Second Regiment's dead from visiting my
dreams."
He put back the tent's entrance flap, and ducked in.
Margaret started to say, "They would never — they loved you," but Sam was gone inside. And just
as well, she thought. My foolish mouth would have hurt him more.

***

No lost cavalry troopers came to his dreaming.
Sam dreamed of being a boy again in their mountain hut... and his Second-mother, Catania, was
reading to him from an old copybook traded out of the south for twenty sheep hides. She read to him
often, fearing he might take to the mountains' signs and tribe-talk instead of book-English.
"'... There were a few foreign families come to the prairie, Germans, Baits, Hungarians. But
they were not felt as foreign as they might have been in cities or small farming towns, since all of
us had come to the prairie as foreigners to it, so in Western-accented English or Eastern English
or Southern English — or in English hardly English at all — we made do together, and were
Americans.
In time, we were to master the rough grasses, the black earth beneath, though it cost us all
our lives to do it. The sky we never mastered. We were too small, too low. We were beneath its
notice.
... One Sunday, we took the wagon the long, rutted road to church, and in church, in the last
row of benches, I saw for the first time a sturdy, small, blond little girl, her hair in braids. She was
wearing a flour-sack dress with little blue blossoms on it — not as nice a dress as my sister's —
and she was to become my friend.'"
His Second-mother stopped reading then, and put the top-sewn copybook away. Her eyes, in the
dream, were the gray he remembered; the scar down her cheek as savage; her hair was white as winter.
"What happens?" Sam asked her.
"Sweetheart, always the same things happen," his Second-mother said. "Happiness is found… then
it is lost… then perhaps found again. And the finding, the losing, and the perhaps, is the story."
...Sam woke, saying, "Wait!" aloud — though for what, he wasn't certain.
A voice from outside and a courteous distance said, "Sir…?"
Sounded like Corporal Fass.
Sam called, "Just a dream, Corporal," and got up off his cot.
There was no more time for mourning, for considering his stupidity in sending a man like Ned Flores
to lose a fight. No time for more vodka. The young Captain-General, that almost-never-defeated