"Kate Elliott - Jaran 4 - The Law of Becoming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

The Web Of Fate
Seven Years Later
CHAPTER ONE
With the Jaran
Sonia had a new loom. She had strung the warp, taut vertical lines of coarse thread that striped the
distant horizon and the lightening expanse of the sky. Seen through the warp, the rolling hills and
endless grass of the southern plains did not look fractured but rather like a promise of the weaving to
come. As she did with every new weaving, Sonia had sited the loom so that the weaver and the
unadorned warp faced east, to catch the rising of Mother Sun.

Tess Soerensen watched as the sun rose, splintering its glory into the yarn. The grass turned gold.
A wandering river, twisting and turning through the land like a child's careless loops, flooded with gold
briefly before shading to a humbler tone of murky blue. In the distance, a solitary rider approached
camp at a gallop, eerie for the sight as yet untouched with sound. The quiet that permeated these vast
plains was in itself a kind of sound, a note of expectation combined with a deep abiding peace.
Although, Tess reflected, perhaps what people heard as peace was only nature's monumental
indifference to the tides of history that rose and fell on its shores.

Sonia poured a cupful of milk onto the ground and threw a handful of earth into the air, where the
wind caught it for an instant before it sprayed in a hundred hissing droplets into the grass. Then she
took her shuttle out of its case and knelt to begin the weaving. Tess sat beside her, helping when
necessary.

"In the long ago time," Sonia began, telling a story to help pass the time as she threaded the weft
through the warp, beating it down, "a pregnant woman began to weave a blanket for her unborn child.
And as she wove, she pulled down threads of moonlight and sunlight, threads of the wind and threads
of river water and of earth, and patterned the blanket as her child's life, as she wanted her child's life
to become. But soon enough she was no longer content just to weave the new child's life but began to
weave the lives of all of her children and of her husband and her sisters and mother and father and
aunts and uncles and at last of her entire tribe. And because such a blanket can never be finished, the
child could not be born."

Tess listened distractedly. In the end, after many trials, the weaver's ancient grandmother had to
unravel the weaving for her, and thus was the child delivered, to live its own life.

Tess felt like that weaver. With a net of invisible threads, she wove the destiny of the jaran. Her
loom had no substance, except perhaps for the implant embedded in her cranium that allowed her
access to a vast network of information and structural ramparts on which and out of which she could
build the matrix—weave the pattern—that had become her task. Her warp, strong and straight, was
the tribes of the jaran. Across it she wove the strands of human space, of the Chapalii Empire, of the
rebellion against the Empire that Tess's brother even now laid the groundwork for, of the infinite twists
and turns any event might take as it became part of the texture.

But she could never be sure that what she was doing was right.

"You're quiet," said Sonia.

"Unquiet," retorted Tess, "in my heart."

Sonia smiled without faltering as she wove. "My sister, you think too much. You must accept the