"Anderson,.Poul.-.Flandry.12.-.A.Stone.in.Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

The sun rose at last. For a while it was a red step pyramid, far and far on the
blurry horizon. The sky was opalescent. Below, land rolled steeply upward,
cresting in a thousand-meter peak where snow and ice flushed in the early light.
That burden spilled down the slopes and across the hills, broken here and there
by a crag, a boulder, a tawny patch of uncovered nullfire, a tree—brightcrown or
saw-frond—which the cold had slain. A flyer hovered aloft, wings dark against a
squat mass of clouds. Yewwl didn't recognize its kind. Strange things from
beyond the Guardian Range were moving in with the freeze.
Ungn, her infant, stirred and mewed in her pouch. Her belly muscles seemed to
glow with it. She might have stopped and dismounted to feed him, but a ruddy
canyon and a tarn gone steel-hard told her through memory how near she was to
her goal. She jabbed foot-claws at her onsar's extensors and the beast stepped
up its pace from a walk to a shamble, as if realizing, weary though it was and
rapidly though the air was thinning, that it could soon rest. Yewwl reached into
a saddlebag, took forth a strip of dried meat, swallowed a part for herself and
chewed the remainder into pulp. Meanwhile she had lifted Ungn into her arms and
cuddled him. Her vanes she folded around her front to give the beloved mite
shelter from the whining, seeking wind.
Ych rode ahead. The sun entered heaven fully, became round and dazzling, gilded
his pelt and sent light aflow over the vanes that he spread in sheer eagerness.
He was nearly grown, lithe, handsome; no ruinous weather could dim the pride of
his youth. His sister Ngao, his junior by three years, rode behind, leading
several pack animals which bore camp gear and the smoked spoils of the hunt. She
was slightly built and quiet, but Yewwl knew she was going to become a real
beauty. Let fate be kind to her!
Having well masticated the food, the mother brought her lips around her baby's
and, with the help of her tongue, fed him. He gurgled and went back to sleep.
She imagined him doing it happily, but knew that was mere imagination. Just six
days old—or fourteen, if you counted from his begetting—he was as yet tiny and
unshapen. His eyes wouldn't open for another four or five days, and he wouldn't
be crawling around on his own till almost half a year after that.
Robreng drew alongside. "Here," Yewwl said. "You take him a while." She handed
Ungn over for her husband to tuck in his pouch. With a close look: "What's
wrong?"
The tautness of his vane-ribs, the quivering along their surfaces, the backward
slant of his ears, everything about him cried unease. He need but say: "I sense
grief before us."
Yewwl lifted her right thigh to bring within reach the knife sheathed there.
(Strapped to the left was a purse for flint, steel, tinderbox, and other such
objects.) "Beasts?" Veldt lopers seldom attacked folk, but a pack of them—or
some different kind of carnivore—might have been driven desperate by hunger.
"Invaders?" The nightmare which never ended was of being overrun by foreigners
whom starvation had forced out of their proper territory.
His muzzle wrinkled, baring fangs, in a negative. "Not those, as far as I can
tell. But things feel wrong here."
In twenty years of marriage, she had learned to trust his judgment nearly as
much as her own. While a bachelor, he had fared widely around, even spending two
seasons north of the Guardians to hunt in the untenanted barrens there. He it
was who had argued, when last the clan leaders met before the Lord of the
Volcano, that this country need not be abandoned. Orchards and grazing would