Читать книгу The Crash of Hennington - Patrick Ness - Страница 11

She was concerned about the dust.

The air smelled heavily of it, but it should have been too early in the year for there to be dust, although the last rains were well gone. There was ash in the dust as well and a distant smell of burning. She paused before she led the herd up to the top of the hill that marked the northern entrance to the descending fields, a place completely lacking in the malodorous homes of the thin creatures. This was just a grassy area, and she shouldn’t have been able to smell dust at all.

(An Arboretum groundskeeper leaned against his rake, watching The Crash from behind a stand of trees. He could see them grazing in the field, Maggerty mooning along after as usual, and he also had a pretty good guess where they were going to head next.

He frowned.)

She looked at the rest of the herd behind her. A lightness of mood permeated the group but left her unaffected. She was the only one who bothered at the dust in the air. The rest of the herdmembers shuffled aimlessly about, pulling at the grass with agile lips, some of the younger calves even playing, gamboling on the lea, if anything so bulky could ever truly be said to gambol. Lush green surrounded them. Families of birds sang to each other in the trees and to those symbiotic brethren who made a meal of the ticks and other annoyances in the herdmembers’ hides. A breeze teased its way through the glade where the herd was gathered, and to every herdmember there, save one, all was well.

She sniffed again, reaching with her nose, even squinting her eyes, their weakness more than compensated for by sensitive nostrils and nimble ears that now also turned and grabbed at any evidence that might linger in the air. Nothing. There was the usual amount of thin creatures scattered in the fields, easy to sense with their eerie strangled cries and halved footfalls, oddities not excepted by the thin creature who constantly followed the herd, also present in her catalogue of senses. Nothing out of the ordinary but the dust.

She snorted and waved her great horn to get the others’ attention. The message communicated itself through the group, and the herd began to file behind her. Yet even as they crossed into the ever more verdant gardens that leapt their way down the hillside, she could still smell the dust, its persistence meaning only one thing.

Hard times were coming.