"MacLeod, Ian R - Sealight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

Her illness was now progressing toward its later stages. He remembered his
father first breaking the news to him many years ago. Him saying, Son, I've got
to tell you something that means you're going to have to grow up quicker than
your mother and I would wish. Ran didn't really understand then. Something
called mermaidosis. But then a kid from across the courtyard showed him a cheap
painting of a woman with the lower body of a fish and laughed and said, that's
what's happening to your Mum, stoopid. Mermaidosis was a virus that took women
in youth and slowly turned their legs and belly to fishscale and/in. The lucky
majority died when the silvering reached their waist, but it was said that some
became fish in the whole.

"Have you had a good day, dear?"

"You know." He shrugged. "Average." What was he supposed to say, some creature
choked when it tried to eat me? Now, maybe if he'd battled it to death . . .

"Looking forward to the wedding tomorrow?"

"Of course."

"Piir's a lovely girl, Ran. She'll make a fine wife . . . " She gave him a look.
" . . . and mother. Living here with us, we'll be more of a family again. Like
long ago when your poor Dad was alive. Come here." She opened her arms.

Ran knelt beside the bed and leaned into the fishy scent of her embrace. He
could feel the pressure of the jeweled knife beneath his jerkin where he had
pushed it into his belt. When his mother's hands patted close to it, he drew
back.

Ran fried skidling for them both on the smoky hob. They ate in silence, both
wrapped in their own visions of the future. Afterward, he washed himself at the
communal tap, changed, refilled his mother's flask of nullwine, settled her
blankets and snuffed out the lights. He tiptoed away, thinking she was asleep,
but as he reached the door, he heard her mutter, "You will be careful, won't
you, dear?"

"You know me," he said. "I'm always careful."

He descended the stairs to the courtyard, looking up, he could see the light of
Piir's window through the shaggy curtain. He turned quickly left alongside the
canal. Loose gray entrails of mist were forming over the water but the heat of
the day remained. Worn paving and crumbling walls gleamed like sweatslick skin.

Ran took a bridge toward the prosperous Middle District. His nostrils were
assailed by different mixes of odor with each breath; potpourri from an open
window, patchouli from a lady, her skirts discreetly lifted to avoid the mud,
the brown reek of a sewer rising up through grating, incense from the open door
of a temple, the spice of a hot meats stall. And sweat on sweat. Heat on heat.