"Kim Newman - Great Western" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

GREAT WESTERN
by Kim Newman
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Copyright ┬й 1997 by Kim Newman
Printed in Year's Best SF 3
HarperPrism
ISBN 0-06-105901-3

eBook scanned & proofed by binwiped 11-10-02 [v1.0]




Cleared paths were no good for Allie. She wasn't supposed to be after rabbits on Squire Maskell's
land. Most of Alder Hill was wildwood, trees webbed together by a growth of bramble nastier than
barbwire. Thorns jabbed into skin and stayed, like bee-stingers.
Just after dawn, the air had a chilly bite but the sunlight was pure and strong. Later, it would get
warm; now, her hands and knees were frozen from dew-damp grass and iron-hard ground.
The Reeve was making a show of being tough on poach-ing, handing down short, sharp sentences.
She'd already got a stripe across her palm for setting snares. Everyone west of Bristol knew Reeve
Draper was Maskell's creature. Serfdom might have been abolished, but the old squires clung to their
pre-War position, through habit as much as tenacity.
Since taking her lash, administered under the village oak by Constable Erskine with a razor-strop,
she'd grown craftier. Wiry enough to tunnel through bramble, she made and trav-elled her own secret,
thorny paths. She'd take Maskell's rab-bits, even if the Reeve's Constable striped her like a tiger.
She set a few snares in obvious spots, where Stan Budge would find and destroy them. Maskell's
gamekeeper wouldn't be happy if he thought no one was even trying to poach. The trick was to set
snares invisibly, in places Budge was too grown-up, too far off the ground, to look.
Even so, none of her nooses had caught anything.
All spring, she'd been hearing gunfire from Alder Hill, resonating across the moors like thunder.
Maskell had the Gilpin brothers out with Browning rifles. They were supposed to be ratting, but the
object of the exercise was to end poach-ing by killing off all the game.
There were rabbit and pigeon carcasses about, some crackly bone bundles in packets of dry skin,
some recent enough to seem shocked to death. It was a sinful waste, what with hungry people queueing
up for parish hand-outs. Quite a few trees had yellow-orange badges, where Terry or Teddy Gilpin had
shot wide of the mark. Squire Maskell would not be heartbroken if one of those wild shots finished up in
her.
Susan told her over and over to be mindful of men with guns. She had a quite reasonable horror of
firearms. Too many people on Sedgmoor died with their gumboots on and a bullet in them. Allie's Dad
and Susan's husband, for two. Susan wouldn't have a gun in the house.
For poaching, Allie didn't like guns anyway. Too loud. She had a catapult made from a garden fork,
double-strength rubber stretched between steel tines. She could put a nail through a half-inch of plywood
from twenty-five feet.
She wriggled out of her tunnel, pushing aside a circle of bramble she'd fixed to hinge like a lid, and
emerged in a clear-ing of loose earth and shale. During the Civil War, a bomb had fallen here and fizzled.
Eventually, the woods would close over the scar.
When she stood up, she could see across the moors, as far as Achelzoy. At night, the infernal lights
of Bridgwater pinked the horizon, clawing a ragged red edge in the curtain of dark. Now, she could
make out the road winding through the wet-lands. The sun, still low, glinted and glimmered in sodden
fields, mirror-fragments strewn in a carpet of grass. There were dangerous marshes out there. Cows