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

had ruled the Widewater.

Larkin had been born in Fairny, but she had never seen one of the great ships--
not by daylight, at least. They had come to her in dreams, so beautiful she
would wake with her throat aching. Tall and slim, white canvas-winged, rigging
singing like harp strings in the wind, they always passed a little beyond reach
in her dreams--just as they had passed across Fairny's horizon. Now all that was
left of them was a slow wake of memories.

Over the banging of her mallet she could hear a loud argument going on in Bobber
-- the stranger's voice shrill with indignation over something; Jumber shouting
back in his demonstrative Toms way. Larkin wondered as she worked if she could
ever marry a man who loved an argument so.

Presently the shouting ceased and footsteps approached across the dock.
"Permission to board?" Jumber's voice said.

Larkin sat back on her heels, pushing a curl of dark hair out of her eyes.
Jumber was grinning at his double entendre. His laughter was part of the spring
to Larkin, like the meadow flowers and the nesting guillemots. It was always
jarring at first, for each fall when the traders left, the village lapsed into a
long silence; as the days dwindled Larkin grew accustomed to communicating in
monosyllables with people who no longer had anything to say to each other. And
then Jumber's laughter would come again, brassily shattering the comfortable
monotony of grayness and decay.

"I thought one of those inland women would have gotten you by now," Larkin said.

"Worried?" he asked. She snorted in answer, but realized that she had been a
little worried: that Jumber's boat wouldn't come again, that springtime would
never return.

"It was a long winter," she said. "Old Father Gort died just before solstice,
Mother Bira just after."

"That's all I ever hear in the spring," lumber said. "Who died."

"It's all that happens here."

"You don't belong here," lumber said.

Larkin shrugged, still unused to navigating by word. She would never be as good
a talker as lumber. He was Torna; they were all born talking.

"The aunties say I'm turning into a seawife," she said.

"A what ?"

"You know, a woman married to her boat. Maybe they don't have them where you
come from;"