"part1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Keith Brooke - Lord of Stone)

[Summer: The Year of Our Lords, 3964]

1

'And out of the mayhem the Lords will arise ... '
- The Book of the World, ch.18, v.29.

The ragged people were all around him, staring and shouting
and waving their fists. Bligh looked down at the rounded
stones lying scattered in the fire. Had he kicked them there?
He did not know.

He remembered hiding in the ruins, looking down at all these
people as they performed their calling to the Gods, the
Prayer of the Body.

Yet now he was here in their midst and the people were
enraged by his incursion.

"No!" he said, again. Nobody moved. The only other noise was
the incessant clatter of a small radio, tuned in to a
southern music station. "This is wrong," he cried. "You can't
do this. It's sick. Do you think that if the Lords were among
you they would recognise - " he gestured " - this as anything
but a cheap sham? Do you? There is nothing Holy about this
charade. Nothing! It's sick ... " He was losing track. He did
not know where he had found the words, or even what they
meant.

He looked around at the people in their filthy tatters,
gathered in the ruins where they were forced to make their
home. These poor people were desperate, they needed something
to believe, something to give their empty existences some
kind of meaning.

As he studied their faces Bligh realised that the time for
violence had passed and he was safe, for now. The mood of the
gathering was returning to the passionate fervour of before,
only now the atmosphere had been subtly transformed.

The people moved away, found their drinks and started to talk
and laugh. Lila, kneeling at Bligh's feet, hooked her hand
into the waistband of his trousers and pulled him towards
her. Her cheeks were smeared with tears and dirt from the
ground. Her daughter was there too, pressing a jug of wine at
him, small eyes pleading with him to accept it.

He did not understand these people's response. He had wrecked
their ceremony but they hardly seemed to care any more. He
drank, long and deep, then passed the jug to Lila and watched