"Robert Charles Wilson - Julian- A Christmas Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

Brazilians but had been crushed by the millstone of political intrigue. He was the son of a powerful
woman, born to a powerful family of her ownтАФnot powerful enough to save Bryce Comstock from the
gallows, but powerful enough to protect Julian, at least temporarily, from the mad calculations of his
uncle. He was both a pawn and a player in the great games of the aristos. And while I had forgotten all
this, Julian had notтАФthese were the people who had made him, and if he chose not to speak of them,
they nevertheless must have haunted his thoughts.

He was, it is true, often frightened of small thingsтАФI still remember his disquiet when I described the
rituals of the Church of Signs to him, and he would sometimes shriek at the distress of animals when our
hunting failed to result in a clean kill. But tonight, here in the ruins, I was the one who half-dozed in a
morose funk, fighting tears; while it was Julian who sat intently still, gazing with resolve from beneath the
strands of dusty hair that straggled over his brows, as coolly calculating as a bank clerk.

When we hunted, he often gave me the rifle to fire the last lethal shot, distrusting his own resolve.

TonightтАФhad the opportunity presented itselfтАФI would have given the rifle to him.

***

I half-dozed, as I said, and from time to time woke to see the Reservist still sitting in guard. His
eyelids were at half-mast, but I put that down to the effect of the hemp flowers he had smoked.
Periodically he would start, as if at a sound inaudible to others, then settle back into place.
He had boiled a copious amount of coffee in a tin pan, and he warmed it whenever he renewed the
fire, and drank sufficiently to keep him from falling asleep. Of necessity, this meant he must once in a
while retreat to a distant part of the dig and attend to physical necessities in relative privacy. This did not
give us any advantage, however, since he carried his Pittsburgh rifle with him, but it allowed a moment or
two in which Julian could whisper without being overheard.

"This man is no mental giant," Julian said. "We may yet get out of here with our freedom."

"It's not his brains so much as his artillery that's stopping us," said I.

"Perhaps we can separate the one from the other. Look there, Adam. Beyond the fireтАФback in the
rubble."

I looked.

There was motion in the shadows, which I began to recognize.

"The distraction may suit our purposes," Julian said, "unless it becomes fatal." And I saw the sweat
that had begun to stand out on his forehead, the terror barely hidden in his eyes. "But I need your help."

I have said that I did not partake of the particular rites of my father's church, and that snakes were not
my favorite creatures. This is true. As much as I have heard about surrendering one's volition to
GodтАФand I had seen my father with a Massassauga Rattler in each hand, trembling with devotion,
speaking in a tongue not only foreign but utterly unknown (though it favored long vowels and stuttered
consonants, much like the sounds he made when he burned his fingers on the coal stove)тАФI could never
entirely assure myself that I would be protected by divine will from the serpent's bite. Some in the
congregation obviously had not been: there was Sarah Prestley, for instance, whose right arm had
swollen up black with venom and had to be amputated by Williams Ford's physician . . . but I will not