"Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 01 - Child of the River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

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THE WHITE BOAT
T 0 1 0 N S T A B L 1 0 F Aeolis was a shrewd, pragmatic man who
did not believe in miracles. In his opinion, everything must
have an explanation, and simple explanations were best of
all. "The sharpest knife cuts cleanest, " he often told his sons.
"The more a man talks, the more likely it is he's lying."
But to the end of his days, he could not explain the affair
of the white boat.
It happened one midsummer night, when the huge black
sky above the Great River was punctuated only by a scattering
of dim halo stars and the dull red swirl, no bigger than
a man's hand, of the Eye of the Preservers. The heaped lights
of the little city of Aeolis and the lights of the carracks riding
at anchor outside the harbor entrance were brighter by far
than anything in the sky.
The summer heat was oppressive to the people of Aeolis.
For most of the day they slept in the relative cool of their
seeps and wallows, rising to begin work when the Rim Mountains
clawed the setting sun, and retiring again when the sun
rose, renewed, above the devouring peaks. In summer, stores
and taverns and workshops stayed open from dusk until dawn,
fishing boats set out at midnight to trawl the black river for
noctilucent polyps and pale shrimp, and the streets of Aeolis




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were crowded and bustling beneath the flare of cressets and
the orange glow of sodium vapor lamps. At night, in summer,
the lights of Aeolis shone like a beacon in the midst of the
dark shore.
That particular night, the Constable and his two eldest sons
were rowing back to Aeolis in their skiff with two vagrant
river traders who had been arrested while trying to run bales
of cigarettes to the unchanged hill tribes of the wild shore
downstream of Aeolis. Part of the traders' contraband cargo,
soft bales sealed in plastic wrap and oiled cloth, was stacked
in the forward well of the skiff-, the traders lay in the stem,
tied up like shoats for the slaughter. The skiff's powerful
motor had been shot out in the brief skirmish, and the Constable's
sons, already as big as their father, sat side by side on
the center thwart, rowing steadily against the current. The