"Howard Waldrop & Leigh Kennedy - One Horse Town" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

"The ones in the clouds of dust. The ones with the baskets."
I can pinpoint this moment as the one when I realize that she isn't quite the woman I'm looking for in life.
Although, looking at her big brown eyes and the fall of the folds of her chiton, I can still remember...
But Cassandra has definitely gone spooky.
While she's seeing things on the plain, we all glance around at each other again. We go to the wall to
look. I think the others see what I see: the dark plain, the black sea. Aeneas rolls his eyes then winds his
finger mid-air around his temple, nodding towards Cassie's back.
"They're coming for us," Cassandra says, taking her earrings off and throwing them down, then grinding
them underfoot. "But it won't matter after tomorrow anyway."
"Uh, right, Cassie," Aeneas says, his hand on her shoulder. "Maybe you should go back now. I'm sure
Auntie Hec is missing you."
Cassandra gives me that long look again. "Coreobus. You will defend me when the big animal spills its
guts into the city?"
We all freeze. I suddenly think thoughts that scare me for their impiety about Apollo and his cruel
revenges on Cassandra. "Yes, ma'am," I say, being polite.
Aeneas guides her away.
After they are gone, Leo and I don't say much. I think he knows that I had it bad for Cassandra. I don't
know how I feel now. Sick. Confused. Even if he didn't know, there isn't much to say when the king's daughter
shows signs of cracking.
We are as bristled as teased cats for the rest of the night. I keep imagining creaking and groaning noises
in the wind.
 Like the sound a ship would make on land.
Impossible.

He stood atop the ruins reaming out his right ear with his little finger like an artilleryman swabbing down a gun
barrel. The autumn wind had got there first, piercing him down to the nerve.
The pain eased, replaced with the dull ringing that came and went, daily, hourly, sometimes by the
minute.
All around and below him in the trenches Turks, Circassians, and Greeks sang, but not together, as each
nation competed with the most drunken-sounding drinking song in their own tongues. Heinrich Schliemann's
ears bothered him too much to try to listen to any of the words; it was all a muffled din to him. The diggers
handed over a long line of baskets, each to each, from where others dug with pick and shovel to the edge of
the hill mound of Hissarlik, where the soil was dumped over into the plain below.
Since there were four or five clans of Turks and Greeks present, he'd learned to put a Circassian between,
so that the baskets went from the diggers to Turk to Circassian to Greek to Circassian to Turk and so on.
Sometimes there were four or five Greeks or Turks to each neutral middleman, sometimes ten or fifteen. The
last in the line were all Circassian, who had the task of filling the flat alluvial plain that stretched away to the
small river flowing to the sea two miles away.
The ringing in his ear returned slowly to the drone (he wasn't that musical, but he'd imitated it as best he
could once for a violinist, who pronounced it "B below middle C") that was always there.
Today, progress was fast. They'd uncovered one of the Roman phase walls and were rapidly digging along
where it sank lower into the debris. What he searched for lay below, probably far below. Only when the
diggers found something other than building stone, perhaps pottery or weapons, did things slow down, the
workers graduating from shovels to trowels while those shifting baskets caught up with others carrying away
piles of earth. But today, the diggers kept at it full swing. He suspected that this meant his colleague,
Dörpfeld, would be along to complain that the diggers weren't being systematic enough. Dörpfeld was
methodical, even for a German. One thing I've learned, Schliemann thought, is that some follow and some
lead. And I'm the leader here.
Schliemann wanted bones: Trojan bones buried with honor. If it was gold that honored them, so much the
better. Schliemann liked the way his Sophia's eyes lit up when she saw the gold they uncovered. Just seeing