"Gilman, Carolyn Ives - The Wild Ships Of Fairny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilman Carolyn Ives)

CAROLYN IVES GILMAN - The Wild Ships Of Fairny

MARRY ME!" JUMBER SHOUTED as soon as his boat was in earshot.

Larkin shook her head and turned to pound more caulking into a crevice in
Kittiwake's deck. She had come out to work on her boat when the uncles had
spotted a sail on the horizon. She had known it would have to be Jumber. No one
else would come to Fairny this early in the year, when the sea hadn't yet thrown
off its winter melancholy.

"Marry me!" he yelled again, apparently thinking she hadn't heard. He was
practically standing on the bowsprit, clutching a forestay. A pink knit sweater
stretched across his rotund torso, and a visored cap hid the thinning patch in
his black hair. He had a bushy mustache and eyes crinkled from squinting into
the sun. Larkin noted enviously that his boat was in even better repair than
last year; painted green and red with shiny brass fittings, she was the
brightest thing Fairny Bay had seen all winter. Larkin resolved to ask lumber to
bring some paint for Kittiwake next time he came, even if it meant doing without
new boots.

"You boat abuser!" she yelled back. "You're risking Bobber's life, taking her
out this early."

"It was love. So shoot me," he said. Then, to his crew, "Come about, you rotting
turds! Where's the hawser? Do I have to do the whole blistering thing myself?"

Bobber nosed neatly in to the tumbledown dock where the great Fairny fleet had
once moored. Jumber had two crewmen this year, Larkin saw. He had prospered.
Back in Soris, the women were probably lined up to catch his eye. Inland women
were like that.

The trader would have jumped onto the sagging gray dock, but stopped when
another person emerged from Bobber's hatch. He was a strange sight, swathed in a
furry greatcoat. His long black hair fell about his shoulders; his close-cropped
black beard was shaved away in comma-shaped sworls down his cheeks. He looked
around at the empty bay, the bare hills, then the line of gray, leaning shacks
that was the village. His brows contracted. "You have cheat me!" he cried
shrilly.

"No, your honor, this is Fairny," Jumber said.

"You gregious Torna, this is lie!" the man insisted. "Where are sheeps?"

"Oh, not again," Jumber said with overtaxed patience. "Listen, I told you there
wasn't much here. You could have gotten your sheep much closer to Softs --
didn't I say that?"

The foreigner looked around. "There are no sheep!"