"Troy Denning - The Harpers 1 - The Parched Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Denning Troy)

the camels came the sound Ruha found most pleasing, the joyful cries of the children who had been tending
the herds. From the rocky outcroppings east of camp came the eerie calls of raptors taking wing for their
nightly hunt. More haunting still was the incessant tittering of the desert bats as they swooped low over the
oasis pond to scoop up tiny mouthfuls of water.
Finally dusk faded to night. The camels were tied up, the children called to their parents' tents, the noisy
birds drawn to the hunt, and the bats lured away to distant clouds of insects. The desert again grew as quiet
as it had been during the day. In camp, the men plucked their rebabas and sang stories to amuse each
other. The women, as always, were more silent than gazelles, but Ruha did not need to hear to know they
were serving hot salted coffee to the men.
After allowing the camp to settle into the comfort of darkness, the young wife tied her belt around her
waist, slipping her jambiya into an empty scabbard. The curved, double-edged dagger was Ruha's prized
possession, for Qoha'dar had given it to her on her twelfth birthday. Next, she wrapped herself in a
billowing, black robe that would camouflage her in the darkness. It would also keep her warm, for the
desert was as cold at night as it was hot dur-ing the day.
Ruha started to leave the khreima, then realized she had forgotten Ajaman's meal. She returned and put
a skin of camel's milk into a kuerabiche, then filled the rest of the shoulder sack with wild apricots.
Carrying supper to her husband would hardly have seemed a valid reason for visit-ing his post if she forgot
the food.
The young wife returned to the door and paused to study the camp. A hundred feet ahead, the full moon
glistened off the oasis pond. As a steady breeze rippled the water, the tiny waves sparkled like white
diamonds. The tangled branches of wild apricot trees ringed the pool, perfuming the air with the scent of
ripe fruit. Above the apricot trees towered thirty majestic palms, their fernlike fronds splayed like open
fingers against the starry sky.
Scattered amongst the trees were the silhouettes of nearly one-hundred khreimas. Robe-clad figures
moved among the tents like specters. Outside the doors, men sat in small groups, singing and drinking salted
coffee, yet si-multaneously listening for the distant blare of an alarm horn.
With a bright moon overhead, there were precious few shadows in which to hide. Fortunately, there was
wind enough to cast an illusion if need be, so Ruha felt confident of reaching Ajaman undetected. She
slipped out of the doorway, then cast a sand-whisper spell that allowed her to move across the desert in
complete silence. She circled to the back of her khreima, careful to stay downwind of camp lest a camel or
dog catch her scent.
A few moments later, she left the oasis. The trees gave way to spindly chenopods spaced at such even
intervals it almost looked as if men had planted them. Beyond the low-lying bushes, the terrain became
completely desolate. Without tree or chenopod roots to hold the soil in place, the wind shaped the sand into
an endless sea of towering cres-cent dunes that stretched to the horizon and beyond.
Ruha knew that the sand sea spanned more than twenty-five thousand square miles. When the dunes
finally waned, they abdicated only to a land of baked earth and wind-scoured bedrock, even more desolate
and lifeless than the sands themselves. This bleak expanse stretched, as far as Ruha knew, to the ends of
the world itself.
 Of course, she had heard stories of a kingdom beyond the desert, but she had also heard tales of lands
beneath the sands and beyond the clouds. To Ruha, who had met only three tribes in a year of riding across
the most heavily populated part of Anauroch, tales of ten-thousand people living in a camp that never
moved were unthinkable. She could not envision a pasture that would support all of their camels month after
month.
As Ruha stalked toward the dunes, the biting odor of the chenopods stung her nose more sharply,
drawing her thoughts back to the desert. She returned her attention to the sand sea.
The moon shone brightly on the gentle slopes of the dunes' convex sides, but the steep slip-faces on the
con-cave sides were plunged into darkness as black as Ruha's robe. Between the crescent-shaped hills ran
a gloomy labyrinth of barren and rocky troughs.
A mile away, El Ma'ra rose a hundred feet over the sands. Ruha knew that Ajaman lay on top of the