"Jay Lake - Green" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

Factor would take me to the harbor, and we would board FortuneтАЩs Flight for a trip
across the sea to the hot land of my birth. Clad in white, picking up bells as I walked
down the road, I would return to my father and Endurance.

Though I could remember the brown eyes of the ox as clearly as if he stood
before me, the only image I could bring to mind of my father was a dark-haired man
with skin the color of my own hurrying away through the rice paddies as Federo
tugged at my hand.

Then there was a clattering of arms and men. Horses snorted as soldiers
swirled into the court followed by a coach. I was astonished to see that each rider
was blindfolded, though they had swords and spears aplenty in their hands.

Federo had said that of men only he and the Factor would lay eyes upon me.

The coach creaked to a stop, swaying slightly on the leather straps of its
suspension. I noted the bridlework on the horses, the silver leaf and chasings on the
carriageтАЩs lacquered body, the blindfolded coachman whose whip trembled in his
hand.

The man within owned me, owned my life. It was by his will that Federo had
taken me from the hot lands of the sun and brought me here. My hands tensed as the
dancing mistress had taught me, but I forced them to loosen.

Surely I deserved a word from this man.

When he stepped from the coach, I was first struck by how ordinary he
appeared. The Factor was of middling height, with brown hair and ruddy skin and
gold-flecked gray eyes. HeтАЩd run to fat in the middle and in his cheeks, and there
was a spill of tobacco on his ruffled silk shirt.

Even so, he possessed a presence I had never imagined a person could have.
The breeze stilled and the birds on the rooftops fell quiet. For a moment, the sun
seemed to stutter in its passage through the sky.

Then the Factor took my chin in his hand and tilted my head back and forth.
He swept my hair from my ears and inspected them. He spread my fingers and
examined each nail. He walked around me twice, then stopped behind me. I was just
wondering what the Factor was about when there was a tearing noise as he cut my
shift away.

He never spoke. He just looked a while, then his fingers tested the softness of
my waist, the firmness of my buttocks. Finally he walked around me once more and
nodded toward Mistress Tirelle standing in the shadows. As he stepped into his
coach, the Factor turned back to meet my eyes.

I stood cold, the morning air pimpling my bare skin, torn between anger and a
deep embarrassment, but hiding both. As he looked at me, I returned the stare,
thinking of the dead gray eye of the ocean leviathan that had nearly taken me off the
shores of my home.