"Walter Jon Williams - Daddy's World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

he said with a sigh, "is breaking for love of Dulcinea."
After a few sessions with Don Quixote-- mixed with a lot of sighing about corazóns and
Dulcinea-- Jamie took a grip on his courage, marched up to El Castillo, and spoke to La Duchesa.
"Pierdo, sueño, haría, ponto!" he cried.
La Duchesa's eyes widened in surprise, and as she bent toward Jamie her severe face became
almost kindly. "You are obviously a very intelligent boy," she said. "You may enter my castle."
And so Don Quixote and La Duchesa, between the two of them, began to teach Jamie to speak
Spanish. If he did well, he was allowed into the parts of the castle where the musicians played
and the dancers stamped, where brave Castilian knights jousted in the tilting yard, and Señor
Esteban told stories in Spanish, always careful to use words that Jamie already knew.
Jamie couldn't help but notice that sometimes Don Quixote behaved strangely. Once, when Jamie
was visiting the Whirlikins, Don Quixote charged up on his horse, waving his sword and crying out
that he would save Jamie from the goblins that were attacking him. Before Jamie could explain that
the Whirlikins were harmless, Don Quixote galloped to the attack. The Whirlikins, alarmed, screwed
themselves into the ground where they were safe, and Don Quixote fell off his horse trying to
swing at one with his sword. After poor Quixote fell off his horse a few times, it was Jamie who
had to rescue the Don, not the other way around.
It was sort of sad and sort of funny. Every time Jamie started to laugh about it, he saw Don
Quixote's mournful face in his mind, and his laugh grew uneasy.
After a while, Jamie's sister Becky began to share Jamie's lessons. She joined him and
Princess Gigunda on the trip to the little schoolhouse, learned reading and math from Mrs. Winkle,
and then, after some coaching from Jamie and Don Quixote, she marched to La Duchesa to shout
irregular verbs and gain entrance to the El Castillo.
Around that time Marcus Tullius Cicero turned up to take them both to the Forum Romanum, a
new part of the world that had appeared to the south of the Whirlikins’ territory. But Cicero and
the people in the Forum, all the shopkeepers and politicians, did not teach Latin the way Don
Quixote taught Spanish, explaining what the new words meant in English, they just talked Latin at
each other and expected Jamie and Becky to understand. Which, eventually, they did. The Spanish
helped. Jamie was a bit better at Latin than Becky, but he explained to her that it was because he
was older.
It was Becky who became interested in solving Princess Gigunda's problem. "We should find her
somebody to love," she said.
"She loves us," Jamie said.
"Don't be silly," Becky said. "She wants a boyfriend."
"I'm her boyfriend," Jamie insisted.
Becky looked a little impatient. "Besides," she said, "it's a puzzle. Just like La Duchesa
and her verbs."
This had not occurred to Jamie before, but now that Becky mentioned it, the idea seemed
obvious. There were a lot of puzzles around, which one or the other of them was always solving,
and Princess Gigunda's lovelessness was, now that he saw it, clearly among them.
So they set out to find Princess Gigunda a mate. This question occupied them for several
days, and several candidates were discussed and rejected. They found no answers until they went to
the chariot race at the of the Circus Maximus. It was the first race in the Circus ever, because
the place had just appeared on the other side of the Palatine Hill from the Forum, and there was a
very large, very excited crowd.
The names of the charioteers were announced as they paraded their chariots to the starting
line. The trumpets sounded, and the chariots bolted from the star as the drivers whipped up the
horses. Jamie watched enthralled as they rolled around the spina for the first lap, and then
shouted in surprise at the sight of Don Quixote galloping onto the Circus Maximus, shouting that