"part5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Keith Brooke - Lord of Stone)

[Summer: The Year of Our Lords, 3964]

1

'"It is written," he said, to the slanderers, and the
besmirchers, and the corrupt. "My House is the House of
Prayer; but you would have it a Den of Vice!"'
- The Book of the World, ch.46, v.43.

The corpses of the fields of Abeyat filled Bligh's days, but
also, they filled his nights. In total, he spent eight days
on the labour gangs, clearing bodies and body-parts. Soon he
learnt to recognise, simply from looking at a dried patch of
mud, whether it was worth breaking its crust with his pick.
If a body lay buried, the mud would be tinged with green, or
it would have dried unevenly, or there would just be
something indefinable that made Bligh tentatively probe its
surface, waiting for the yielding resistance of decaying
flesh, or the hard snagging of a bone. He was rarely
mistaken. He prided himself on his skills: where some people
could divine water, flowing beneath the ground, Bligh could
divine bodies. It was an unusual talent, and one, he
supposed, which would rarely have been discovered in the
ordinary course of a person's life.

On their second day in Abeyat, Bligh and Black Paul were not
selected from the men waiting in the town square. Bligh
suspected that the priests had learnt to recognise the men's
faces and so distributed the work evenly amongst the needy.
"Time for moving on, then," said Black Paul, as they
retreated from the square, in search of somewhere cool to
spend the day.

Bligh had learnt to accept Black Paul's decisions without
comment, but today he shook his head. "No," he said. "If
we're still here tomorrow they'll give us more work. Or the
day after. There's a lot to do out there."

Black Paul looked at him, surprised. "You wants to go out
there again? Am I hearing your words true?" The previous day
had been hard for Black Paul. Despite his protestations, he
was not well suited to hard work and he had been irritable
for most of the following evening.

Bligh shrugged. "The Church's shilling is as good as any," he
said.

"But the tables," said Black Paul. When he got onto the
timetables, Bligh knew there was no shifting him. "The tables
says there's a coker through at four sixteen this afternoon.