olya_brooklyn: переводы

→"I am sorry," he said, his voice weary although his posture was as poker-straight as ever. "I won't bother you about it again. I didn't mean to tell you."

→"I ... I don't ..."

→"What makes you think I can forget that? Any more than I can forget that I will never see your face?"

→She couldn't help laughing. "You forget which of us is the slave and which the master."

→"I won't do it again, if you don't want."

→At first she did not even understand what he was saying, could make no sense of it. She said, hastily, to fill the gap, "You're lucky you didn't break your neck."

→His head was turned toward the window again. He said, "You spend so much time there."

→"Why? What on earth possessed you?"

→"Yes."

→"You?"

→The silence was just long enough for her to curse herself as an idiot before he said, "That was ... I."

→Her louring anxiety distracted her so much that she asked the librarian, forgetting that he was the last person in the fortress likely to know, "Who else goes down to the beach?"

→Except that they didn't. The locusts were not a sea-faring people except in the necessity of finding new countries to conquer. They were not interested in the water and the wind and the harsh smell of salt. In all the time she had been in the fortress, she had never found any evidence that anyone except herself used the stairs to the beach. She was trying hard not to remember the day her husband had said, casually, A messenger came from the lighthouse today. Says there's strangers landing on the long beach. Little things. Little things led up to disaster. She was afraid, and she climbed the stairs back to the fortress like a woman moving through a nightmare.

→She sat and watched, trying to convince herself that this was not an auspice of doom, that other people in the fortress could come down to the beach without any purpose more sinister than taking a walk.

→She signed, All right, more emphatically than she felt it, but he seemed to be satisfied, for he turned away and began playing a game of catch-me with the two dogs who had accompanied him that morning.

→Yes, the child signed, but he was still watching her as if he wanted her to show him what he ought to do.

→But he was all she had, and he was watching her closely. His face never showed any emotion, except when he snarled with fear or anger, so she did not know what he felt—if anything at all. She asked, All right?

→The shock made her head swim, and she sat down, hard and not gracefully, on a lump of protruding rock. She had no way of asking him who had come, or what they had done, and in a hard, clear flash of bitterness, she thought how stupid of her it was to pretend this child could in any way replace her dead son.

→Until the day when he answered, yes.

→She worried that her visits might draw the fortress's attention to him—for whatever the librarian said, she was not convinced the locusts would not kill the child simply because they could—but she asked him regularly if other people came down to the beach, and he always answered, no. She wasn't sure if he understood what she was asking, and the question was really more of an apotropaic ritual; it gave her comfort, even though she suspected it was meaningless.