"Walter Jon Williams - Argonautica (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

Argonautica v2

by Walter Jon Williams

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1.

*Pelias meeteth the One-Sandaled Man*

Jase Miller first saw the iron monster in its improvised drydock off the Yazoo. The huge creature had her nose into the land and showed her armored ass to the river. Her twin stacks and rust-red casemate loomed above the flat Old River country like a visitation from another world. Laboring darkies swarmed over the thing like ants. Even over the sound of the _General Bee's_ engine, Jase could hear the ring of hammers on railroad iron.

"There she lies," he thought, "and I am going to have her or get hung."

"Not as big as I thought," said Ensign Harry Klee, who had seen _Louisiana_ before she burned.

"Big enough," said Jase, and wondered again how he would steal her. By indirections find directions out, he thought.

He signaled the engine room for ahead slow, then tapped the bell twice to send a leadsman to the bow for soundings. _General Bee_ dropped off its bow wave, slowed in the murky water. Shoreward, a cottonmouth moccasin bared its fangs from the safety of an oak limb.

Strange country, Jase thought. He was a salt-water sailor, and unused to the ways of rivers. The meandering Yazoo country was simultaneously open and constricted -- absolutely flat, though with all its sight lines hemmed in by dense hardwood forests. Cypress, willows, cottonwoods, all thirsty trees that clung to the banks of the river. Everything that stood was strung with vines. There were alligators here, and snakes; herons and cormorants flocked in thousands.

And it was hot. Hot as a boiler room. Jase yearned for a sea breeze.

"By the mark three!" sang the leadsman. "Half less three! By the mark twain!"

Jase maneuvered the tug toward the bank, signaled astern slow, and brought the _Bee_ gently to ground on Yazoo mud. The levee began to fill with curious bystanders.

Ensign Klee's huge body almost blocked the pilothouse window. "Any of them look like much a senator to you, Jase?" he said.

Jase peered around Klee. "May be the fellow in the top hat."

Harry Klee squinted and spat. "He looks more like an undertaker."

"Guess I'll go ashore and find out."

Jase rolled down his shirt sleeves and put on his grey uniform jacket -- visiting a former senator required a degree of formality -- then he adjusted his straw boater and made his way past the thirty-pound Parrott rifle on the foredeck. Once there, he discovered that the mechanism for lowering the gangway had jammed.

"Sorry, sir," said Castor, one of the twins, in his Cockney accent. "I'll 'ave it fixed in a tic."

Jase looked at the group of people standing on the levee and felt his temper rise. He decided he was not about to stand and be gawked at while he waited for the gangway to be repaired, so he dropped off the bow and waded to the land, wet above the knee. The Yazoo mud took one of his boots, which did not improve his temper. He splashed ashore and mounted the four-foot-high levee in one stride.

"Senator Pendergas?" he asked the fellow in the top hat.

The man shook his head. "That's the general there," he said, "coming this way."

The senator -- now a general -- was a broad, round-headed man in shirt sleeves, striped uniform pants held across his big belly by red suspenders. His shirt front was stained with tobacco. When Jase saluted him, Pendergas held out one big hand and waited for Jase to shake it. Jase did as the man seemed to want.