A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur (читать книги полные .txt) 📗

Sean let the five minutes run over to ten, then told Job cheerfully, "On your feet, soldier, let's eat some ground."

Getting Job up on his feet again was torture for both of them, and Sean realized that in trying to be gentle on him, he had allowed Job to rest too long. The wound had begun to stiffen.

The next thirty-minute stage endured so long that Sean was convinced his watch had stopped. He had to check the sweep of the second hand to reassure himself.

When at last he lowered him to a sitting position, Job grimaced.

"Sorry, Sean, cramps. Left calf."

Sean squatted in front of him and felt the knots of tortured muscle in Job's leg. While he massaged it, he spoke quietly to Claudia. "There are salt tablets in the medic pack, front pocket."

Job swallowed them, and Claudia held the water bottle to his lips.

After two swallows he pushed it away.

More," Claudia urged him, but he shook his head.

"Don't waste it," he murmured.

"How's that feel?" Sean gave his calf a couple of hard slaps.

"Good for another few miles."

"Let's go," Sean said. "Before it seizes up again."

It amazed Claudia how the two of them kept going through the night with only those five-minute breaks and the frugal drafts from the water bottles.

"Three hundred miles of this," she thought. "It simply is not possible. Flesh and blood can't take it. It will kill both of them."

A little before dawn, Matatu popped up like a small black shadow out of the forest and whispered to Sean.

"He has found a water hole about two or three miles ahead," Sean told them. "Can you make it, Job?"

The sun had risen and cleared the tops of the trees, and the day's heat was building up like a stoked furnace. When Job collapsed and hung suspended at Sean's side, dangling with his full weight on the cross straps, they were still half a mile from the water hole.

Sean lowered him to the ground and sat beside him. He was so exhausted himself that for a few minutes he could not find the energy to talk or move.

"Well, at least you picked a good place to pass out," he congratulated Job a in hoarse whisper. They were in a patch of thick thorn bush that would give them shade and cover for the rest of the day.

The made a bed of cut grass for Job in the shade and settled him on it. He was only half conscious, his speech slurred and andering and his eyes continually slipping out of focus. Claudia tried to feed him, but he turned his face away. However, he drank thirstily when at last Matatu and Alphonso returned from the water hole with all the water bottles refilled. After he had drunk he lapsed back into coma, and they waited out the heat of the day in the thorn patch.

Sean and Claudia lay in each other's arms, for she had become so accustomed to falling asleep in his embrace. She realized that Sean was near the end of his tether. She had never imagined he could be so finely stretched, that even his strength, which she had come to believe was inexhaustible, had a limit upon it.

When she woke a little after noon, he lay like a dead man beside her and she studied his face lovingly, almost greedily. His beard was full and beginning to curl, and she picked out two curly silver hairs in the dense bush. His features were punt, all trace of fat and superfluous flesh burnedlaway, and there were lines and weathered creases in his skin that she had never noticed before. She studied them as though 6 LIFE history were chiseled into them like cuneiform writing on a tablet she could read. "God, but I love him," she thought, amazed at the depth of her own feelings. His skin was burned to the color of dark mahogany by the sun, yet it retained a luster like that of fine leather, well used but polished with care over the years, "like Papa's polo boots." She smiled at the simile, but it was somehow apt. She had watched her father in his dressing room lovingly applying dubbin to the leather with his fingers and polishing it to a dull glow with his own bare palm.

"Boots!" she whispered. "That's a good name for you," she told Sean as he slept, and she remembered how her father's boots had flexed and wrinkled at the ankle, almost as supple as silk as he stepped up into the stirrup. "Wrinkled just like you, my old boot."

She smiled and kissed the lines in his forehead softly so as not to wake him.

She realized then to just what an extent the memory of her father had been absorbed in this man who lay for once like a child in her arms. The two men seemed to have merged in one body, and she could concentrate all her love in a single place. Gently she moved Sean's sleeping head until it nestled against her shoulder, and she burrowed her fingers into the dense springing curls at the back of his head and rocked him gently.

Up to this moment, he had succeeded in evoking the full spectrum of her emotions, from anger to sensual passion---everything except tenderness. Now, however, it was complete. "My baby," she whispered as tenderly as a mother. For once she truly felt he belonged to her completely.

A soft groan shattered her fragile mood. She raised her head and glanced across at where Job lay beneath the thorn bush nearby, but he relapsed into silence once again.

She thought about the two of them, Job and Sean and their special masculine relationship in which she knew she could never share. She should have been jealous, but instead in some strange way it made her feel more secure. If Sean could be so constant and self-sacrificing in his love for another man, she hoped that she could expect the same constancy from him in their own different but even more intense relationship.

Job groaned again and began to thrash about restlessly. She sighed and then gently disentangled herself from Sean's sleeping form, stood up, and crossed to where Job lay.