She Lover of Death: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin by Boris Akunin Read Free Book Online Page B

again .
     
‘The young cadet condemned himself to death
After his visit to a whore.
You neatly open up his brain pan
To find what you are looking for .
     
‘And you will find the piece of lead you seek
Among the grey necrotic mush,
Glinting dully like some precious pearl
Lodged in the epithalimus.
     
    The reader broke off, crumpled up the sheet of paper and put it back in his pocket.
    ‘I wanted to describe the lungs of a woman who has drowned as well, but I couldn’t manage it. I only made up one line: “Among the dove-grey spongy mass”, but I just couldn’t carry on . . . Well gentlemen, was it very bad?’
    Nobody spoke, waiting for the verdict of the chairman (he was the only one there still sitting in his original pose).
    ‘ “Epicrisis” – I believe that is the conclusion of a medical diagnosis,’ Prospero said, slowly and thoughtfully.
    ‘Yes indeed,’ Horatio agreed eagerly.
    ‘A-ha,’ Prospero drawled. ‘Well, this is my epicrisis for you: you cannot write poetry. But you are genuinely entranced by the multiplicity of the faces of death. Who is next?’
    ‘Teacher, let me!’ said a large strapping fellow with broad shoulders, raising his hand. He had childlike, naive blue eyes that looked strange in his coarse face. What does he want with the Eternal Bride? Columbine thought in surprise. He should be floating rafts of timber down the Angara river.
    ‘The Doge dubbed him Caliban,’ Petya whispered, and then felt it necessary to explain. ‘That’s from Shakespeare.’ Columbine nodded: so it was from Shakespeare. ‘Nowadays he works as an accountant in some loan company or other. He used to be a bookkeeper in a merchant-shipping line, sailing the oceans, but he was shipwrecked and only survived by a miracle, so he doesn’t go to sea any more.’
    She smiled, pleased with her skill in reading faces – she hadn’t been so very far wrong with those rafts of timber.
    ‘As far as intellect goes, he’s a complete nonentity, an amoeba,’ Petya gossiped and then added enviously, ‘but Prospero gives him special treatment.’
    Stamping loudly, Caliban walked out into the centre of the room, cocked his hip and started bawling out extremely strange verse in a stentorian voice:
    The Island of Death
     
Where blue waves murmur to the sky
And seabirds ride the ocean swell
There is a solitary isle
Where only ghosts and phantoms dwell .
     
‘Some of them lie there on the sand
And over them the crabs do crawl
Others in mournful sorrow wander,
Bare skeletons, no flesh at all .
     
‘The rattling of their bones I hear,
I see them walk, oh horrid sight!
It fills me with such dreadful fear,
I cannot get to sleep at night .
     
‘My teeth do knock, my hands do shake
Even by the bright light of day.
I long to be there with the wraiths
On that dread island far away .
     
‘Then we shall blithe and merry be,
Rejoicing as we did before,
Luring the vessels from the sea
On to the jagged cliffy shore .
     
    At the beginning Columbine almost snorted out loud, but Caliban declaimed his ungainly doggerel with such feeling that she soon stopped wanting to laugh, and the final verse sent cold shivers down her spine.
    She glanced at Prospero without the slightest doubt that the severe judge who had dared to criticise Lorelei Rubinstein herself would demolish these shoddy efforts utterly.
    But he didn’t!
    ‘Very good,’ the Doge declared. ‘Such expression! You can hear the sound of the ocean waves and see their foaming crests. Powerful. Impressive.’
    Caliban’s face lit up in a smile of happiness that completely transformed his square-cut features.
    ‘I told you, he’s the favourite,’ Petya muttered in her ear. ‘What on earth does he see in this primitive amoeba? Aha, this is Avaddon, he’s at university with me. He’s the one who brought me here.’
    Now it was the turn of the ill-favoured youth with blackheads who had been talking to Petya earlier.
    The Doge nodded