"Gordon R. Dickson - Chantry Guild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

quietly let herself out into the hall. Still carrying the boots, she went
along it to make use of the communal bathroom at the hall's end; then
descended the narrow wooden stairs into the street.
Just inside the tenement's street door, she stopped to put on the boots. The
smock had a hood, which she now pulled up over her head to hide her face.
Silently, lifting the latch of the door, she slipped out into the mist-dimmed,
pre-dawn light of the empty streets of Porphyry. It was a small town in the
subtropical uplands of Hysperia, the northeastern continent of the Exotic
planet of Kultis.
Through those streets between the graying, unpainted wood faces of the
tenements, she went swiftly. Most of the local
2 Gordon R. Dickson Exotics, rooted out of their
countryside homes, had been brought here and required to build these dwellings
for their own shelter, close under the eye of authority; and the fact that the
required design and materials of the buildings made them firetraps had not
been entirely unintentional on the part of the designers. For the plan behind
the Occupation was for the Exotics of Mara and Kultis to die off-as much as
possible by their own doing.
She thought of those sleeping within; and felt a sensation as if her heart
moved under her breast at the thought of leaving them, as a mother might react
at having to leave her children in the hands of brutal and antagonistic
caretakers. But the word that had been sent her was the one message that could
override all else; and she had no choice but to go.
After several turnings down different streets she slipped between two
buildings and emerged into the open yard-space behind them. Just before her
lifted the six-meter height of the wooden fence that now enclosed the town;
and which those who inhabited it had also been forced to build.
At the foot of this fence she stopped and, reaching in through a slit in her
robe, loosened something. As she gave her body a shake a coil of loose rope
dropped about her feet. She stepped out of it and bent to pick it up by the
running loop already worked into one end.
She gathered up the rest of the rope and dropped it by arm-lengths back onto
the sparse grass of the untended ground at her feet, shaking it out and
recoiling it up again into loose loops in her left hand, to make sure there
were no kinks in it. Then, taking the last meter or so of the other end with
the running loop into her right hand, she shook the loop sliding through that
eye of rope to a larger circle, swung it a few times to get the feel of its
weight and balance, and took a step back from the foot of the wall.
She looked up at the fence, past the flimsy walkway that allowed it to be
patrolled by those on guard, with no more than their heads showing above the
pointed ends of the uprightly placed logs that made it.
Selecting one particular log-end, she swung the captive loop in her right hand
in a couple of graceful circles and then let it fly upward. She had been
handling a lasso since her early childhood on the distant planet of her birth,
one of the few Younger Worlds
THE CHANTRY GUILD 3 where a variform of horses
had flourished. The loop flew fair and true to settle over the upper end of
the log she had chosen.
She pulled it tightly closed, and tried her weight on the rope. Then, with its
aid, she walked up the inner face of the wall until she could pull herself