"Jeff VanderMeer - Dradin, in Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

Dradin, in Love
Novella
By
Jeff VanderMeer
I.

Dradin, in love, beneath the window of his love, staring up at her while
crowds surge and seethe around him, bumping and bruising him all unawares in
their rough-clothed, bright-rouged thousands. For Dradin watches her, she
taking dictation from a machine, an inscrutable block of gray from which
sprouts the earphones she wears over her delicate egg-shaped head. Dradin is
struck dumb and dumber still by the seraphim blue of her eyes and the cascade
of long and lustrous black hair over her shoulders, her pale face gloomy against
the glass and masked by the reflection of the graying sky above. She is three
stories up, ensconced in brick and mortar, almost a monument, her seat near
the window just above the sign that reads "Hoegbotton & Sons, Distributors."
Hoegbotton & Sons: the largest importer and exporter in all of lawless
Ambergris, that oldest of cities named for the most valuable and secret part of
the whale. Hoegbotton & Sons: boxes and boxes of depravities shipped for
the amusement of the decadent from far, far Surphasia and the nether regions
of the Occident, those places that moisten, ripen, and decay in a blink. And
yet, Dradin surmises, she looks as if she comes from more contented stock,
not a stay-at-home, but uncomfortable abroad, unless traveling on the arm of
her lover. Does she have a lover? A husband? Are her parents yet living?
Does she like the opera or the bawdy theatre shows put on down by the
docks, where the creaking limbs of laborers load the crates of Hoegbotton &
Sons onto barges that take the measure of the mighty River Moth as it flows,
sludge-filled and torpid, down into the rapid swell of the sea? If she likes the
theatre, I can at least afford her, Dradin thinks, gawping up at her. His long
hair slides down into his face, but so struck is he that he does not care. The
heat withers him this far from the river, but he ignores the noose of sweat
round his neck.

Dradin, dressed in black with dusty white collar, dusty black shoes, and the
demeanor of an out-of-work missionary (which indeed he is), had not meant to
see the woman. Dradin had not meant to look up at all. He had been looking
down to pick up the coins he had lost through a hole in his threadbare
trousers, their seat torn by the lurching carriage ride from the docks into
Ambergris, the carriage drawn by a horse bound for the glue factory, perhaps
taken to the slaughter yards that very day--the day before the Festival of the
Freshwater Squid as the carriage driver took pains to inform him, perhaps
hoping Dradin would require his further services. But it was all Dradin could
do to stay seated as they made their way to a hostel, deposited his baggage in
a room, and returned once more to the merchant districts--to catch a bit of
local color, a bite to eat--where he and the carriage driver parted company.
The driver's mangy beast had left its stale smell on Dradin, but it was a
necessary beast nonetheless, for he could never have afforded a mechanized
horse, a vehicle of smoke and oil. Not when he would soon be down to his
last coins and in desperate need of a job, the job he had come to Ambergris to
 GIFTS FOR ANY OCCASION: