"John Dalmas - Yngling 4 - The Yngling in Yamato" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

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Matthew Kumalo didn't wonder why he was playing chauffeur to a Neoviking chieftain. It paid off: the big
barbarian had been their entry into remarkable areas of study. And of course, there was the Northman's charisma: you
tended automatically to do what he wanted.
Besides Matthew and Nils Järnhann, a woman and two men rode the pinnace, skimming some fifty meters above a
rolling sea of grass. Grass turned tawny by drought and late-summer frost. Waves swept it, the heads of fescue and
deschampsia bending to a fresh breeze.
He flew on manual, guiding on an ancient, overgrown highway, its cuts and Ms still evident. Its pavement,
though, had long since disintegrated and been buried by dust storms. In these times it knew only the hooves of saddle
mounts, the tough splayed feet of pack camels, and the infrequent herds of sheep and cattle being driven to China.
Nils Järnhann watched as if the blank glass eyes in his sockets were functional, then spoke to the pilot in front of him.
"Fly higher," he said. "We'll be there soon."
Matthew Kumalo pulled gently on the control and soared to five kilometers, gaining speed. Ahead, the undulations
became rounded hills. Beyond them, from his new altitude, he could see a broad basin, and on the far side, mountains
high enough that the upper slopes were dark with forest. Moments later, the pinnace left the final rounded hill
behind, and Matthew slowed.
The basin was a broad valley, a river flowing through it in wide looping curves, with groves and strips of
woods along its banks. In the distance westward, a vast dust cloud rose. As seen from the pinnace, it could have
been a great herd of cattle being driven to new pastures, but in fact, the khan's personal tümen was in training
there, 10,000 strong. Much nearer, on the south side of the river, was a large encampment, laid out in orderly
lines and rectangles like a city of the ancients.
"Is that it?" Matthew asked pointing.
"That's it," Nils answered. "That's Urga. Stop above it, and I'll find which is the ger of the khan."
After her husband had parked five kilometers above it, the
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senior ethnologist, Nikko Kumalo, set the viewer on "scan." Then she moved aside to let the eyeless barbarian
operate it. She was still not entirely used to the ease with which Nils .used equipment. Nor did she stop to
wonder why, with his psionic vision, he even bothered with the scanner.
The Buriat encampment was an orderly set of sub-camps distributed over an area several kilometers on a
side. The Northman adjusted the magnification until it occupied almost all the screen. A brief scan showed which ger
was the khan's: the largest-a felt tent a dozen meters across, shaped like an inverted serving bowl. It was
whitewashed like most of the others, but a banner hung from a pole in front of it.
Nils didn't at once Sock onto it. A little apart from the others, outside their pattern, was another splendid ger scarcely
smaller than the khan's, with other, lesser gert close around it, their arrangement different from that of the
Buriat camp. Nils recognized it as the camp of the Chinese ambassador, though it was larger than when he'd seen it
last. Near it was a paddock a hectare in size, the horses in it notably bigger and finer than the tough Buriat ponies.
Only after several seconds did Nils return his attention to the khan's ger, and lock the viewer on the ground in front
of it.
"There is something wrong here," he said to Matthew. "Take us down to ten doubles,1 and I'll hail them."
Pinnace Alpha began a silent descent, accelerating down a gravitic vector that intersected the ground within
meters of the khan's door. There was activity in the camp-women and some older children pursuing duties, other
children playing, and male slaves tending lactating mares in the vicinity-but no one noticed the descending pinnace
till it was within three hundred meters of the ground and slowing. These were not a people who looked upward much,
except when falconing. Then a child saw it, and called out. Others looked up, first children, then their elders, and the
Alpha's sound pickup caught the spreading shouts. People scattered, some ducking into gert, others running
away. Some emerged with bows in hand. At

--- 1A double is a length measurement equal to about 1.7 meters. It is called a double because it is two strides long.
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fifty meters the pinnace stopped, and Nils used the loud-hailer, speaking Buriat.