"S. M. Stirling - Shikari in Galveston" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

Witches. The steamboat was an Imperial thing. Imperials were city folk, even more than the Mehk, and so
to be despised as weaklings. Yet they were also the masters and makers of all things wonderful, of the best
guns, of boats pushed by fire and of writing on paper, of fine steel and fine glassware and of cloth softer
than a maiden's cheek. And they told tales wilder than any Robre had made around the fire of an evening,
about lands beyond the eastern seas and a mighty queen who ruled half the world from a city with a
thousand thousand dwellers and stone houses taller than ojd-growth pines.
Robre snorted and spat again. The Imperials also claimed their Queen-Empress ruled all the land here,
which was not just a tall tale but a stupid, insulting one. The Seven Tribes knew that they and none other
ruled their homes, and they would kill any man among them who dared call himself a king, as if free
clansmen were no better than Mehk peons.
I figure the Imperials come from one of the islands in the eastern sea, Robre thought, nodding to
himself. Everyone knew there were a mort of islands out there: England, Africa, the Isle of Three Witches.
Past Kuba or Baydos, even, maybe. They puff it up big to impress gullible folk down along the coast.
The clansman pushed past an open-fronted smithy full of noise and clamor, where the blacksmith and his
apprentices hammered and sweated, and on to a big shack of planks. The shutters on the front were
opened wide, and he gave an inward sigh of relief. He'd have had to turn round and go home, if the little
Imperial merchant hadn't been here; he usually stopped first at Dannulsford Fair on his yearly rounds, but
not always.
 "Heya, Banerjii," he said.
Banerjii looked up from the gloom inside the store, where he sat cross-legged on a cushion with a plank
across his lap holding abacus and account book.
"Namaste, Hunter Robre, sunna Jowan," he said, and made an odd gesture, like a bow with hands
pressed palm-to-palm before his face, which was his folk's way of saying heya and shaking hands.
"Come in, it being always wery good to see you," the trader went on, in good Seven Tribes speech but
with an odd singsong accent that turned every w to a v.
Odd, Robre thought, as he sat and a few local boys hired by the trader saw to his baggage and beasts.
But then, the merchant was odd in all ways. He looked strange— brown as a Mehk, but fine boned and
plump, sharp featured and clean shaven. His clothing was a jacket of lose white cotton, a fore-and-aft cap
of the same, and an elaborately folded loincloth he called something like dooty. Even odder was his
bodyguard, who was somehow an Imperial, too, for all that he looked nothing at all like his employer, being
three shades lighter for starters; there were men of the Seven Tribes who were darker of skin. The guard
was nearly as tall as Robre, and looked near as strong; and unlike his clean-shaved employer, he wore a
neat spade-shaped beard. He also tucked his hair up under a wrapped cloth turban, wore pants and tunic
and belt, and at that belt carried a single-edged blade as long as a clansman's short sword. He looked as if
he knew exactly what to do with it, too, while Banerjii was soft enough to spread on a hunk ofcornpone.
A young man who looked like a relative of the merchant brought food, a bowl of ham and beans, the
luxury of a loaf of wheaten bread, and a big mug of corn beer. All were good of their kind; the cooked dish
was full of spices that made his eyes water and mouth burn. He cleared it with a wad of bread and a draft
of the cool lumpy beer, which tasted like that from Jefe Carul's own barrels. Banerjii nibbled politely from a
separate tray; another of his oddities was that he'd eat no food that wasn't prepared by his own kin, and no
meat at all. Some thought he feared poison.
They made polite conversation about weather and crops and gossip, until Robre wiped the inside of the
bowl with the heel of the bread, belched, and downed the last of the beer. During the talk his eyes had
kept flicking to the wall. Not to the shimmering cloth printed with peacock colors and beautiful alien
patterns, though he longed to. lay a bolt of it before his mother, or to the axes and swords and knives, or
to the medicines and herbs, or to the tools. You .could get cloth and cutlery and plowshares, needles and
thread anywhere, if none so fine. It was the two rifles that drew his gaze, and the bandoliers of bright
brass cartridges. No other folk on earth made those.
"So," Banerjii said. "Pelts are slow this year, but I might be able to take a few—for friendship's sake,
you understand."