"Alexander Kazantsev - The Destruction of Faena" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kazantsev Alexander)

the board grazing her slightly.
Mada surfaced and looked round. The stranger's eyes met hers as he
bobbed up to the surface. He laughed joyfully and promptly began
swimming towards her, seizing the board on the way.
"Hold on!" he shouted while still some distance off.
Mada could not make anything out, but she smiled in answer, since she
realised that he was hurrying to her assistance. When he swam up to her,
she said:
"I want to stand on that..." and she pointed at the board.
"Ave Mar will be happy to help..."
"Mada Jupi."
"You'll learn the meaning of joy, strength and happiness!"
The people standing on the shore watched what was happening on the
other side of the breakwater. A sigh coursed along the beach when the two
figures appeared standing straight up on the crest of a wave, holding on to
one another and each evidently standing with one foot on the board. It
seemed like a miracle. With their arms round each other's waists in full
view of the onlookers and without falling, they were borne on the foaming
crest towards the beach.
Never had Mada experienced such pleasure before.
Even so, when Mada and Ave crossed the breakwater and were
returning with the board to the crowded beach, Mada felt uneasy. If
someone had told her the day before that she was capable of such
flightiness, she would have burst out laughing.
Ave held the board in one hand and was ready to help Mada with the
other if the surf swept her off her feet. But Mada went ahead of him and,
skipping over the gurgling foam with a laugh, was the first to run up onto
the beach.
She seemed to be showing that, as the Dictator's daughter, she could do
whatever she liked!
Her anxious companion wrapped her charge up in the fluffy sheet.
"How good it was! If you only knew how good it was, Mother Lua!"
"As if I couldn't know," she grumbled. "I nearly died, waiting for you. If
anything happened to you, I'd surely be executed by order of Yar Jupi
(may he be happy, the great man!)"
"It's a good thing you're alive and can help me with one or two little
matters."
Mother Lua gave her a stern look.
"It frightens me to think of it, my dear."
Mother Lua had guessed rightly about her charge's intentions. Mada
had always dreamed about a real Faetian, manly, noble and pure. The
uncultured Faetians among the Superiors, flaunting a civilisation that had
become static since ancient times, repelled her with their boorishness,
arrogance and contempt for the roundheads, whose children her mother
had once nursed. The stranger, as her nanny had told her, was alien to all
gloomy superstitions of the Superiors; he was a scholar of Danjab who was
not afraid to break free of the Science of Death there and end up at
loggerheads with everybody. It was just such a Faetian that Mada could
dream about, and he had, on top of all that, turned out to be athletic,
daring and handsome.