"S. M. Stirling - Sea of Time 03 - On the Oceans of Eternity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

"A faint shadow," Clemens said. "We have to hope it's enough.
It's more than the rebel Walker has."

To himself he added: We think. So far.

"Then how can he hope to stand before you?"

"He'll be fighting close to the lands he's made his own, near to
Ahhiyawa, Greece. The lands of our strength are far, far away
from here."

"On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;

His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

And thick on Severn snow the leaves."

"That's Wenlock Edge," Commodore Marian Alston-Kurlelo
went on, pointing to a looming darkness in the south, an
escarpment beyond the river they sought. Her hand swung
westward toward a conical shape. "And we're on the slopes of
Wrekin hill. An English poet named Housman wrote that, a little
before my time."

Adventure, bah, humbug, she thought. A Shropshire Lad I
could read back home in front of the fire, with a cup of hot
cocoa.

She gripped the hairy warmth of her horse more tightly with
her thighs, as rain hissed down through the tossing branches
above. It ran around the edges of her sou'wester and rain slicker
into the sodden blue wool of her uniform, leaching her body's
warmth. If you absolutely had to be out in weather like this, nine
hundred pounds of hay-fueled heater were a comfort.

Marian Alston had joined the Coast Guard at eighteen, a
gawky bookish tomboy furiously determined to escape her
beginnings on a hardscrabble farm in the tidewater country of
South Carolina. She was in her forties now, a tall slender
ebony-black woman going a little gray at the temples of her
close-cropped wiry hair, with a face that might have come from
a Benin bronze in its high-cheeked, broad-nosed comeliness.

They paused at a slight rise, where a fold in the ridge gave
them a view over swaying forest and the country that fell away
before them. She went on: