"George Alec Effinger - Marid 3 - The Exile Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

My visitor held the lamp up to let the light fall upon my face. "Yaa Allah!" she murmured when she saw that I
was conscious. Her other hand quickly grasped the edge of her head cloth and pulled it across her face. I had seen
her only briefly, but I knew that she was a solemn, pretty, but very dirty girl, probably in her late teens.
 I took as deep a breath as I could with the pain in my chest and lungs, and I croaked out another "Help." She
stood there, blinking down at me for a few moments. Then she knelt, placed the lamp on the level sand beyond my
reach, stood up again, and ran from the tent. I have -that effect on women sometimes.
Now I began to worry. Where exactly was I, and how did I get here? Was I in the hands of friends or enemies? I
knew I must be among desert nomads, but which des-ert? There are quite a number of sand seas throughout the
geographic expanse of the Islamic world. I could be anywhere from the western edge of the Sahara in Mo-rocco to the
fringes of the Gobi in Mongolia. I might have been only a few miles south of the city, for that matter.
While I was turning these thoughts over in my trou-bled mind, the dark-shrouded girl returned. She stood beside
me and asked me questions. I could tell they were questions by the inflections. The trouble was that I could make out
only about one word in ten. She was speaking some rough dialect of Arabic, but she might as well have been
jabbering in Japanese for all I could tell.
I shook my head, once slightly to the left, once to the right. "I hurt," I said in my dead voice.
She just stared at me. It didn't seem that she'd under-stood me. She was still holding her head cloth modestly
across her face, just below her nose, but I thought her expressionтАФthat part of it that was visibleтАФwas very kind and
concerned. At least, I chose to believe that for the moment.
She tried speaking to me again, but I still couldn't understand what she was saying. I managed to get out "Who are
you?" and she nodded and said "Noora." In Arabic, that means "light," but I guessed it was also her name. From the
moment she'd come into the tent with her lamp, she'd been the only light in my darkness.
The front flap was thrown roughly aside and someone else entered, carrying a leather bag and another lamp. This
was not a large tent, maybe twelve feet in diameter and six feet high, so it was getting kind of crowded. Noora moved
back against the black wall, and the man squatted beside me and studied me for a moment. He had a stern, lean face
dominated by a huge hooked nose. His skin was lined and weathered, and it was difficult for me to guess his age. He
wore a long shirt and he had a keffiya on his head, but it wasn't bound with a black rope akal, merely twisted around
with its ends stuffed in somehow. In the dancing shadows he looked like a murderous savage. Matters weren't made
any better when he asked me a few questions in the same dialect Noora had used. I think one of them had to do with
where I'd come from. All I could do was tell him about the city. He may have then asked me where the city was, but I
couldn't be sure that's what he said.
"I hurt," I croaked.
He nodded and opened his leather bag. I was sur-prised when he pulled out an old-fashioned disposable syringe
and a vial of some fluid. He loaded the needle and jammed it into my hip. I gasped in pain, and he patted my wrist. He
clucked something, and even ignorant of his dialect I could tell it was "There, there."
He stood up and regarded me thoughtfully for a while longer. Then he signaled to Noora and they left me alone. In
a few minutes, the injection had taken effect. My ex-pertise in these matters told me that I'd been given a healthy dose
of Sonneine; the injectable variety was much more effective than the tabs I bought in the Budayeen. I. was tearfully
grateful. If that rough-skinned man had come back into the tent just then, I would have given him anything he asked.
I surrendered myself to the powerful drug and floated, knowing all the while that the relief from pain would soon
end. In the illusory moments of well-being, I tried to do some serious thinking. I knew that something was terribly
wrong, and that as soon as I was better I'd need to set things right again. The Sonneine let me believe that noth-ing
was beyond my power.
My drug-deluded mind told me that I was in a state of grace. Everything was fine. I'd achieved a separate peace
with the world and with every individual in it. I felt as if I had immense stores of physical and intellectual energy to
draw upon. There were problems, yes, but they were emi-nently solvable. The future looked like one golden vista of
victory after another: Heaven on Earth.
It was while I was congratulating myself on my good fortune that the hawk-faced man returned, this time with-out
Noora. I was sort of sad about that. Anyway, the man squatted down beside me, resting his haunches on his heels. I
could never get the hang of sitting like that for very long; I've always been a city boy.
This time when he spoke to me, I could understand him perfectly. "Who are you, O Shaykh?" he asked.