Khalifstork: переводы

→Arjun told him. He was relieved to get it out. He had not told anyone the truth about his mission; it was too private. But this was the first time he had been pressed, and why not?

→“Balls. You’re looking for something. You’re no kind of merchant-trader; I mean look at you. And from what I hear, you haven’t ‘represented your order’ to anyone but a lot of buskers and other street filth, who are, I can tell you, one rung down on Ararat’s great ladder from book-dealers, which I can say from experience is a rung that is sunk deep indeed in the shit. Heady believes your story ’cause he’s a creature whose senses are highly specialized to detect the tiniest quivering motions of power, which you’ve not got, so he can barely see you. But I see. It’s my business. Tell me and maybe I can find it for you.”

→“As I’ve said, I’m here to represent my order to Ararat’s Estates, in hope of commerce between our—”

→“Not interested. What are you interested in? Heady says you just drift around like a fart listening to music all day.”

→“I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of it. I was wondering about the language. Arcana sounds like—”

→“You interested?”

→“Arcana Caelestia?”

→“Fucking awful. I hike all the way up to Tyn Wald and I sit myself in some godsawful café all afternoon until the pervert running it wants to know whether sir will be ordering anything further and I’m out on my arse, my purchasing options being limited, which ain’t surprising given that I have waited all day to meet a man to purchase a copy of Arcana Caelestia, which perhaps I might sell, keep me in food and drink for long enough to eke out the whole horrible business a little longer, were it not that the bastard did not show up, all bastard day.”

→On his return, he found that Madam Defour had cajoled all her lodgers out into the garden, where, in the weak candlelight, she conducted a strained flirtation with Heady. The other lodgers sat around the table making desultory conversation. Arjun had no choice but to join them. He asked Haycock about his day.

→As the last light drained from the sky, the orchestra came to the final, jubilant crescendo of Karpinsky’s Sacred Dance, a crashing of cymbals and a banging of drums; and up over the hill, across the sky from behind the Observatory, the Thunderer came in ominous progress, a black shape limned by fireworks, hanging over the Heath. Arjun felt for a moment that he and the crowds down on the dark Heath were all underwater, looking up. The orchestra went silent as the great ship’s guns took up a slow, pounding rhythm, both celebratory and threatening.

→In the evening, he joined the crowds up on Laud Heath, for a carnival thrown by the Countess Ilona. Clowns and fire-eaters entertained the jostling crowds. Fireworks exploded overhead. At the west end of the Heath, the Countess’s orchestra played for a quieter audience. Arjun slipped in at the back to listen.

→He went walking down to the Fourth Ward. He leaned over the edge of a dry canal and listened to a group of children down in the mud. They formed a circle to sing together. Something about a plague; one by one, they clapped hands and fell laughing out of the circle onto their backs. Arjun recognized the tune: it was a simplified form of a hymn the cantors of Lavilokan sang, up on Goshen Tor. They scattered when they saw him watching.

→The day after, Heady gave Arjun directions to the Mass How Parliament, and he queued all day outside its stolid bronze-red bulk. The queue seemed to move no faster than the dead dignitaries carved into the walls. The police turned them all away in the evening. Arjun began to doubt Girolamo’s advice.

→The next morning, Arjun followed Heady to the fortress of the Marquis Mensonge, which crowned the arc of the Diorite Bridge like a helmet’s plumes. There were flags everywhere, purple and silver. A soldier at the gate, in purple and silver, too, planted his mailed fist in Arjun’s ribs and shoved him back into the street, telling him to waste someone else’s time, if he must.

→Less-romantic gossip pictured him going mad in his quarters, clutching the bloody dress to himself in the darkness, weeping and pleading. That was possibly closer to the truth; though he’d let the dress go, he clutched it close in his dreams. And certainly he saw nothing romantic in his situation. Every day it was harder to rouse himself from his bunk. There was a constant numb ache in his head. His men avoided him; he snarled and swore at them, and had found himself more than once gripping the hilt of his sword with half-formed intent. He was not sleeping; his dreams were waking dreams, and cold, and repetitive, and pointless. But when the guns fired—when the walls burst and those tiny, fragile figures had scattered and fallen—well, that was something. That was a sort of feeling. The flash and the thunder were like a kind of joy.

→He knew what they said about him. He rarely went anywhere these days except the Countess’s estates and the Thunderer itself, but he’d overheard the gossip: the Mourning Captain, all clad in black. There were stories in the papers and ballads sung in the streets. The Era’s editorials called him a throwback to a nobler, more sensitive age, which sat poorly with their claims that he and his wonderful ship were heralds of the city’s future; but it sold papers either way. He’d caught the popular imagination. Romantics pictured him grieving at the prow of his ship; he’d confiscated a chapbook from one of the men on which, under the words GRIEF’S LONELY WARRIOR, he was pictured in black, a single tear on his chiseled cheek, gazing at the horizon, hand on his sword. It was a publication of disgraceful and dispiriting stupidity. Young women wrote him letters by the sackful; after reading a few—perfumed, appallingly florid—he’d ordered his valet to burn them and all similar missives.

→Arlandes was neither proud nor ashamed. The fireworks exploded over the Heath and lit his face violent reds and greens and he still stared blankly at the sunset.

→There had been perhaps two hundred people in the Fort. Not all of them had been men, though Arlandes did not know their exact numbers, and had not cared to descend into the rubble to count.

→The Fort crumbled at the first volley from the Thunderer’s guns. It was built of some soft yellow sandstone and it turned back to sand. There had been riflemen on the turrets firing pointlessly at the Thunderer’s side; when the walls burst into powder and smoke they’d fallen screaming. The inner structures of the Fort were made of wood, and burned. The Thunderer’s bombards had sprayed oil and powder and flame wherever they struck. It had been a resoundingly successful test.

→The battle—if you could call it a battle—had been fought that morning, at dawn, as the sun rose over the Bay so that the water seemed stained with blood. There was an island in the Bay, a rocky island, crowned with a fort: Sleutel’s Island and Sleutel’s Fort. The rocks and the reefs made it almost unapproachable by unfriendly ships, so Sleutel and Sleutel’s predecessors had generally been left alone. They seized the occasional ship; it had always been seen as a kind of tax.