"Neal Stephenson - Baroque Cycle 1 - Quicksilver" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

open like an infant's dilating the birth canal. When it finds the widest part it drops suddenly onto her
shoulders. Her knees pimple the front of her apron and her skirts telescope into the platform as she makes
to collapse. The executioner hugs her with one arm, like a dancing-master, to keep her upright, and adjusts
the knot while an official reads the death warrant. This is as bland as a lease. The crowd scratches and
shuffles. There are none of the diversions of a London hanging: no catcalls, jugglers, or pickpockets.
Down at the other end of the Common, a squadron of lobsterbacks drills and marches round the base of a
hummock with a stone powder-house planted in its top.

An Irish sergeant bellowsтАФbored but indignantтАФin a voice that carries forever on the wind, like the smell
of smoke.

He's not come to watch witch-hangings, but now that Enoch's blundered into one it would be bad form to
leave. There is a drum-roll, and then a sudden awkward silence. He judges it very far from the worst
hanging he's ever seenтАФno kicking or writhing, no breaking of ropes or unraveling of knotsтАФall in all, an
unusually competent piece of work.

He hadn't really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do thingsтАФhangings included
тАФwith a blunt, blank efficiency that's admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish,
they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other
people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is
because most of them came over on ships.

As they are cutting the limp witch down, a gust tumbles over the Common from the North. On Sir Isaac
Newton's temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is
probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube
thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties. But this sort of wind, coming as it does
from the North in the autumn, is more chilling than any mere instrument can tell. It reminds everyone here
that if they don't want to be dead in a few months' time, they have firewood to stack and chinks to caulk.
The wind is noticed by a hoarse preacher at the base of the gallows, who takes it to be Satan himself, come
to carry the witch's soul to hell, and who is not slow to share this opinion with his flock. The preacher is
staring Enoch in the eye as he testifies.

Enoch feels the heightened, chafing self-consciousness that is the precursor to fear. What's to prevent them
from trying and hanging him as a witch?

How must he look to these people? A man of indefinable age but evidently broad experience, with silver

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hair queued down to the small of his back, a copper-red beard, pale gray eyes, and skin weathered and
marred like a blacksmith's ox-hide apron. Dressed in a long traveling-cloak, a walking-staff and an
outmoded rapier strapped 'longside the saddle of a notably fine black horse. Two pistols in his waistband,
prominent enough that Indians, highwaymen, and French raiders can clearly see them from ambuscades
(he'd like to move them out of view, but reaching for them at this moment seems like a bad idea).
Saddlebags (should they be

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