"Robert F. Young - Tents of Kedar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

As he died and the stars went out, he dreamed as he always did of the summer of his life and of
Anastasia wafting through it like a gentle wind, breathing through his castle window and enveloping him
while he slept, permeating his life and softening the austerity of his existence. Mornings, she had brought
him orange juice while he sat upon the patio gazing out over the dawn lawn; evenings, she had mixed
martinis when the day's work was done. And every afternoon there had been tea тАФ tea brewed as only
she could brew it тАФ dew-sweet, mellow, as golden as the sun.
She was awed by him when she first arrived at the plantation. His full name was Ulysses Eastcliff III;
he owned, or would upon the death of his mother, one hundred thousand acres of rich river-silted land
upon which flourished, to the tune of four harvests a year, the farinaceous grain that constituted Silver
Dollar's staff of life. But her awe of him, had she but known it, fell far short of his awe of her. It should
not have. The Ebonon colonials were justifiably, if aggressively proud of the new country they had
created so far from home and, mindful of the inequities of the past, were forever proclaiming that theirs
was the ultimate in democratic societies; but no one knew better than he that they were lying in their teeth
тАФ that he, Eastcliff, was King. As such, he should have been totally unaffected by the beautiful
commoner who stood before him, as indifferent toward her as though she had been made of clay.
He had not been. Looking into her gold-brown eyes, simultaneously seeing the swirls and undulations
of her dark-red hair, he had found it impossible to believe that anything as earthly as an employment
agency could be responsible for her presence in his office. She was fresh from the slopes of Olympus, the
daughter of a modern-day Zeus, begot by him of the star-bedight maid of spring. And she was so young,
so heart-breakingly, so poignantly young. It had frightened him that first time when he had seen his rude
hands upon her smooth and flawless flesh, and he had been afraid that she would be repelled by his
no-longer-youthful body. She had not been. There had been no real reason for her to have been. He had
but just turned forty, and he had been lean and hard, and he had not yet become host for the lethal
schizomycetes of Meiskin's disease.
His atherosclerotic mother had resented Anastasia at first. The girl had no family, her background
was vague. Surely such as she was no fit vehicle through which to perpetuate the Eastcliff name.
Eastcliff's sister, too, had resented her in the beginning, while his brother-in-law had been cruelly
contumelious тАФ until Eastcliff took him behind the stables and beat him nearly to death. But in less than a
month Anastasia won all of them over; as for Eastcliff, he had already toppled like a tall, gnarled oak.
There had been women in his life тАФ many of them тАФ but they had been mere mistresses: the plantation
had been his one true love. No more. Two months after Anastasia became his private secretary, she
became his wife, and the night of his life had brightened to day.

Eastcliff came back from death at dawn. Sefira was already up and about. She had brewed coffee
in the galley, and when she saw he was awake, she brought him a cup, smiling shyly. "Good morning."
The coffee didn't taste remotely like the kind he made. For this, he was grateful. It was strong, but
not in the least bitter, and she had added just enough milk to color it. "How did you know I take no
sugar?" he asked, sitting sideways on the deckchair, resting the cup on his knee.
"You look like the sort of man who mightn't."
"What sort of man is that?"
She smiled. "The sort of man like you."
The first rays of the rising sun, splashing suddenly upon the river and turning the gray deck of the
launch to gold, brought out the intensity of her blackness, emphasizing that unanalyzable quirk of
pigmentation that made the members of the Ebononese race seem not merely black but blue. Her skin
glistened, and he realized she had bathed in the river while he still slept. Her black hair glistened too,
falling, without a kerchief to restrain it, to her shoulders. It was freshly combed.
He saw how close the banks were: overnight, the river had narrowed to half its former width and the
current had doubled in strength. He knew the clinic must be close. The bush-doctor who had diagnozed
his illness and made an appointment for him had said when Eastcliff informed him he would travel by
boat, "Not long after the river narrows you will come to an abrupt bend. The clinic is just beyond the