"Pierce, Tamora - The Circle Opens 01 - Magic Steps" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pierce Tamora)

The duke leaned over to pat her knee. "Fortunately, my dear, you need have
nothing to do with any of Rokat's tribe. For that, I am thankful."
* * *
Pasco leaned forward as Osa rowed his boat around the low wharf that served the
fishing village. Ahead of them stretched a broad length of beach on which a few
boats had been careened for scraping and repairs. Lanterns glinted from the
fishing boats as their owners prepared to sail. More people had gathered on the
strand. Under a lantern dangling from a pole, a man sat cross-legged, testing
the drum in his lap. A woman stood behind him, playing scales on a wooden flute.
"Your dad got musicians?" Pasco asked, goosebumps crawling over his back and
arms. "For me?" He'll blame me when it doesn't work, Pasco thought, panicked.
He'll say I promised I could dance a catch for him, and want me to pay these
people!
"It's only my uncle and my cousin," Osa told him pa tiently. "Calm down. You
jump worse than a landed cod."
Pasco made a face at his friend. The closer they got to the beach, the more he
wished he'd said no when Osa first spoke: of doing this.
You wanted to be paid for dancing, Pasco thought woefully, his breakfast a lead
weight in his belly. Paid like a real dancer, like' the ones who dance at
festivals and for the duke, instead of just dancing at parties with your cousins
and, friends. .And now it'll go bad, because you. didn't' have: the backbone to
refuse!
His mother had said it time after time, "You. never think of consequences,
Pasco. You just think about right now. One of these days the consequences will
take you, blind side: in an alley, and you'll, wonder how things got so bad. He
pressed his; face to his knees shivering.
Soon enough he felt the scrape of bottom under their keel. Strong hands grabbed
the sides of the boat and dragged it up onto the beach.
"Come on, boy," a voice told him. Pasco looked up into the flinty eyes of Osa's
grandmother. She wrapped a big-knuckled hand around his arm. "Take off your
shoon. You got to learn this net-dance fast if you're to do it before we sail."
Men were working next to the flute player and drum mer, laying something on the
beach a corner at a time and securing it by staking it down. It was a real net,
Pasco saw, one with bigger holes than most fishing nets. Hurriedly he stepped
out of his shoes. Men and women left the boats to stand along the edges of the
spread net, the lantern light rippling over their faces. They looked grim and
forbidding, like statues of stern old gods.
"Two months 'thout enough fish to cover the deck," one of them muttered. "This
better work."
Pasco's store of courage, never large, shrank even more as he looked at their
faces, I'm dead, he thought weakly. I just ain't bothered to lay down yet.
"It's an easy step," Osa's grandmother told him. "Look at my feet, boy. I don't
want to go repeating it. See, you dance each square of the net, like so." She
was nimble in spite of her years, her feet tapping lightly on the sand to shape
the four corners of a square. She did a light step overЧ,"Next square, right in
the middle," she explained to PascoЧher feet leaving a dent in the sand that
would form its center. "Up one row of the net, down the next." Drummer and flute
player were trying a lively tune that made Pasco think of leaping fish. Suddenly
he was wide awake. His feet were already tracing the sand pattern of steps
without waiting for his head to decide to do it.