"ab Hugh, Dafydd - Jiana 02 - Warriorwards" - читать интересную книгу автора (ab Hugh Dafydd)

Dafydd ab Hugh
Tugga grunted and lost his balance, stumbling back another two steps. Jiana pressed, anticipating His every twist. Blindly, she nicked him again and again as the crowd pressed closer.
She smelled their sweat, the stench of their hot breath. They hungered for a good cut. So many, so many were the crowd that the floor shifted and rolled on its pontoons.
Tugga sucked in a gasping breath, and Jiana felt rather than heard the slice. She took one giant-step forward, letting her weight roll with the waves, carrying her own Wave.
She felt the ineffectual slap of the top third of Tugga's sword against her upper thigh. But her own Wave bowed like a palace arch as she reached over his arm, pressed the tip against his chest, and thrust.
Had Wave been bare, Tugga's blood would have slaked its thirst. Even with the point guard, he whooped with pain as the hard blow struck his sternum. He called blood and urine upon Jiana and her ancestors.
Jiana slowly ran her finger under her blindfold, removing it with an elegant, studied motion that the audience loved. They began to chant: HU-hu-hu-hu HU-hu-hu-hu. . . . Her stomach tightened, and she swallowed bile.
"Champeen takes it in two," said Maqtan. "Lay them out, boys, big ends first."
"Hi, hi!" cried one fat woman, as she gathered her winnings from the teakeep of the Squatting Dog. "She's invulceable, that's what she is I says."
Maq said nothing, but toted the ledgers. He smiled, and Jiana thought he must have covered the house edge.
Silently, he handed Jiana her fourth-share. It was a bit more than the price of a Bay Bay dueling permit, an errand she dared not neglect. Two miserable days spent white-washing public buildings was enough. Dueling with an expired license was a serious offense, and had not Judge "Tan Tan" Dutillai as much as told her she would sure be jugged next time?
"Good call, that blindfold," said Maq, admiring his cut.
"What next, do I have to tie my hands and hold a bucket of horsefeed between my teeth?"
WARRIORWARDS
9
"It'd bring in the chums."
"Face it, Maq. No one wants to duel me anymore. Soon they won't duel at all but just surround me and wait for me to walk across the waves."
Then the ghouls, the watchers, the lurkers would not come, and Maq would let her go as cheerfully as he had booked her, two moons back.
Then what? Who hires a hero?
Jiana held the long, day pipe steadily, keeping the tremor out of her hands, breathing deep. She held the glowing taper to the bowl, drawing longЧlong and hard though it bit at her throat like sand in a whirlwind. Violence crackled through her body, turning eyes to fire and toes to ice, black hair to grey embers and bold blood to cold ocean.
Peering through the smoke and the buzzbees (were they there? sure, were they there?) He looked at her taut face, His black eyes peeking through a placid smile, waiting for the tindersmoke to ignite her stomach. He: Tong Aouyong, the Tunk, supreme high something-or-other muckety-muck of one of the thousands of TRUE successors of the Old Ways, the First Men, the Ti-Ji Tul. He says.
At least he baths and doesn't drool, she thought. At least the son of a bachelor actually seems to know more than I and packs a mean pipe, butЧ
The world became a bend, Focus Number One at the Tunk (for precision, at his smile), Focus Number Two at Jiana, She Herself. She leaned a gentle back, leaning back, taking the tip of the clay in her mouth once again, drawing deep of the thousand thousand thousand thousand magic sandsmoke.
The shapes in the roof-thatching stepped off, came alive, came off and into the air: dancing triangles, squares interloving a circle, spinning a child's hoop, banking and rounding, so round, so bridge. The shapes (their hooves crashing, flashing sparks against the wooden planks of the Floating City) stepped off, turned to longs and shorts as she drew again on the long, white clay pipe, turned to faces jeering, laughingЧ
10
Dafydd ab Hugh
* * *
ЧCaterwauling, "hey, girlie," growled Maq from behind the bar, "wanna drink?"
Jiana ignored the patronizing term. Maq was what he was.
"If I start drinking, 111 wind up walking another day on these blood-slippery pontoons without a stamp on my permit."
"You gotta do that every moon?"
"Yeah, it's a twenty-eight day curse." She smiled at Maq's puzzled frown as he looked up, feeling it sail over his head.
"You going out?" he asked. "You better shave."
Jiana blinked, and a fat troll sat across from her in the smokey hut, smoking, puffing on a great clay pipe, intelligent eyes like bright buttons watching, looking through the windows of her soulЧbut another blink and it was goneЧ she was with Maq in the Squatting Dog.
Jiana gingerly pulled her right boot on, trying not to rub the tender scab below the knee. It had taken a long time to heal this far.
"Maybe I'll just grow it all back."
"Fuck no! It's distinctual. Want me to shave it?"
She smiled, wincing as she put weight back on the leg. She looked dubiously at her cloak, still soaked from the pitcher of ale, cheaper than strongtea.
"Give me your coat. It stinks outside."
"There's been some waves, and you got that bum knee."
"If I can walk home after a dozen of your Baby Boilers, I bet I can get to the Bureau of Duels and Marriages. Anyway, even after the stamp I have a copper claw for the ferry."
"Well, at least let me shave your head."
Jiana closed her eyes and slowly ran her fingers along her scalp, feeling the rough stubble that surrounded the long, black strip of hair in the middle.
"I like doing it myself," she whispered towards the ceiling. Maq would understand. She never let him shave her. His hands shook (and he was who he was).
WARRIORWARDS
11
Jiana cupped her hands over her face, and tilted her head back. She reveled in the bubble of privacy formed by her tented fingers, warmed by her boozy breath. Then the conversational jumble pierced the peace like a bagpipe joining a quiet flute.
/ am a billboard, she thought, cold denunciation razoring through contentment. I'm a sword-whore. 1 have a headache.
I see horses, cheered, a thousand thousand . . . Too many thousands, she feared. No more thousands. Jiana inhaled deeply from the water pipe, holding the smoke in her lungs as long as she could.
"Do you see souls? or horses?" Sure and it must have been the Tunk who spoke, but the voice was lost from whence it came, coming from now here and again there, and mostly from Jiana's own stomach.