"Gene Wolfe - Endangered Species" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

tarded the stiff fingers, and the corpse performed a slow
pirouette, like the half turn of a thrown knife seen by an
ephemerid, or the tumbling of a derelict through the abyss
that separates the worlds. Clambering down into the bow,
he tried to grapple it with his pike; it was just out of reach.

He waited, horrified and impatient. At last he was able to
draw it nearer and slide the hook under one arm. The corpse
rolled over easily, far more easily than he had anticipated,
its face pressed below the dark surface by the weight of the
lifted arm, then bobbing up when that arm lay in the water
once more.

It was a woman, naked and not long dead. Her staring
eyes still showed traces of kohl; her teeth gleamed faintly
through half-parted lips. He tried to judge her as he had
judged the women whose compliance he had secured for
coins, to weigh her breasts with his eyes and applaud or
condemn the roundness of her belly; he discovered that he
could not do so, that in the way he sought to see her she was
beyond his sight, unreachable as the unborn, unreachable as
his mother had been when he had once, as a boy, happened
upon her bathing.

Eata's touch on his shoulder made him spin around.

"My watch."

"This-" he began, and could say nothing more. He
pointed.

"I'll fend it off," Eata told him. "You get some sleep. Take
the other bunk No one's using it."
He handed Eata the pike and went below, hardly knowing
what he did and nearly crushing his fingers beneath the
hatch.

A candle guttered in a dish on the broken chest, and he
realized that Eata had not slept. One of the narrow bunks
was rumpled. He took the other, tying triple knots in the
thong that held his burse to his belt, loosening his jerkin,
swinging his booted feet onto the hard, thin mattress, and
pulling up a blanket of surprisingly soft merino. A puff of
his breath extinguished the yellow candle flame, and he
closed his eyes.

The dead woman floated in the dark. He pushed her away,
turning his thoughts to pleasant things: the room where he
had slept as a boy, the hawk and the harrier he had left
behind. The mountain meads of his father's estate rose be-