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

Constable was perched on a button cushion in the skiffs high
stem, steering for the lights of Aeolis.
The Constable was drinking steadily from a cruse of wine.
He was a large man with loose gray skin and gross features,
like a figure hastily molded from clay and abandoned before
it was completed. A pair of tusks protruded like daggers from
his meaty upper lip. One tusk had been broken when he




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had
fought and killed his father, and the Constable had had
capped with silver; silver chinked against the neck of the
cruse each time he took a swig of wine.
The Constable was not in a good temper. He would make
a fair profit from his half of the captured cargo (die other
half would go to the Aedile, if he could spare an hour or so
from his excavations to pronounce sentence on the traders),
but the arrest had not gone smoothly. The river traders had
hired a pentad of ruffians as an escort, and they had put up
a desperate fight before the Constable and his sons had managed
to dispatch them. The Constable's shoulders had taken
a bad cut, cleaving through blubber to the muscle beneath,
and his back had been scorched by reflection of the pistol
bolt which had damaged the skiff s motor. Fortunately, the
weapon, which had probably predated the foundation of Aeolis
, had misfired on the second shot and killed the man using
it, but the Constable knew that he could not rely on good
luck forever. He was getting old, ponderous and muddled
when once he had been quick and strong. He knew that
sooner or later one of his sons would challenge him, and he
was worried that this night's botched episode was a harbinger
of his decline. Like all strong men, he feared his own weakness
more than death, for strength was how he measured the




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worth of his life.
Now and then he turned and looked back at the pyre of
the smugglers' boat. It had burnt to the waterline, a flickering
dash of light riding its own reflection far out across the river's
broad black plain. The Constable's sons had run it aground