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

single file along a trail that bordered the river. Apparently they knew her, for all of them waved back.
Toward midmorning, she said, тАЬWe are quite close now."
 Looking up ahead, Eastcliff saw the bend. But he knew shame rather than relief. Meiskin's disease
was endemic to Ebonon alone, but thus far only a few Ebonon colonials had contracted it. All of them,
apparently, had had the courage to spurn the clinic and die in dignity in their own beds. All of them
except him.
The launch, still keeping meticulously to the middle of the stream, began rounding the bend. On either
side, towering trees, flashing with the multicolored patterns of parakeets in flight, extended frond-laden
branches over the river, as though seeking to make contact. Inland, similar trees marched in serried
battalions to low, grass-covered hills. Beyond the bend the river widened, and the hills receded into misty
distances. On the right sprawled a bush-black village from whose waterfront a sturdy pier, lined with
driuhs, protruded. It was no different basically from a dozen other native villages Eastcliff had seen:
wretched huts haphazardly constructed of sticks and stones and vines, and roofed with overlapping
fronds; a maze of narrow streets, no two of them running in the same direction. Only the clinic, rising
beyond the bedlam of primitive buildings, made it distinguishable from its innumerable cousins of the
bush.
"Clinic" was a misnomer. Dimensionally, at least, the institution more nearly corresponded to a
hospital. By native standards, it was undoubtedly a modern, soul-satisfying edifice. By Eastcliff's, it was
an architectural atrocity. The building material consisted almost exclusively of blue clay that had been
dredged from the river bottom and molded into large rectangular blocks. Structurally, the building
seemed sound enough, and the natural coloring supplied by the blocks was inoffensive to the eye; but it
was painfully evident to Eastcliff that the builders had gone about their task without a vestige of a plan.
From all indications, they had begun with a square, one-storied structure, amply large enough, no doubt,
to have accommodated the chirurgeons first patients. But as the patients multiplied, additions had been
tacked on, stories added; and then, as the need for more and more space continued, additions had been
added to additions and, in those cases where the foundations could support the extra weight, stories to
stories. The result was a hodgepodge of conterminous structures, no two of them the same height, that
sprawled back into the bush and out of sight and that exceeded the village in size.
Eastcliff docked without undue difficulty between two driuhs. Sefira had gone below; now she
re-appeared on deck, wearing her bright red kerchief and carrying her crimson satchel. In her new
surroundings, her calico half-skirt and halter seemed less grotesque.
A crowd had begun gathering on the pier. She paused by the rail, gazing into Eastcliff's eyes as
though searching for something. Whatever it was, she did not seem to find it. "Thank you for bringing me
upriver," she said. Then her eyes left his and she looked out over the people on the pier. "'I am black but
comely,'" he thought he heard her murmur. "'As the tents of Kedar. As the curtains of Solomon."' Her
eyes lowered to the gathering crowd. 'They are so curious тАФ my people. That is because they are so
empty. So hollow." She returned her eyes to his. "Thank you again for your kindness." She hesitated,
then turned abruptly, climbed over the rail and stepped down to the pier.
"Good-by," he called after her, mildly surprised that she had not offered him money for her passage.
He watched her make her way through the crowd, enter one of the village streets and disappear, and as
he watched, deja vu overwhelmed him so utterly that his throat constricted and his vision blurred. It was
as though he had just said good-by to Anastasia тАФ not to a bush-black female whom he would probably
forget before tomorrow.
Irony added itself to his distress, rendering it the more acute. For he had never said good-by to
Anastasia тАФ he had never had the chance. They had gone to sleep one night in each other's arms and he
had awakened to find her gone. Gone from his bed, gone from his house, gone from his demesne. Half
out of his mind when she did not return, he had contacted the territorial governor and ordered him to
initiate a discreet search. The search yielded nothing in the matter of her whereabouts, but it yielded a
number of unappetizing items concerning her past. She had arrived on Silver Dollar slightly more than a
year ago and overnight had become the highest priced and most sought-after whore on the Port D'argent