"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 02 - Commitment Hour" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

Uh-oh.

I didn't know how long the stranger had lingered here, but it wouldn't have taken much to spot my snare.
Maybe it was a good idea to amble over that direction—not to break the rules by checking my trap
before dawn, but just to see if there were bootprints close to it. Sure enough, the prints were there, lots
of them... and my trap had caught something.

There was a duck tangled in the net, a motionless duck. I felt a perk of excitement—me, the first person
in twenty years who warranted the attention of the gods.

But gloating was childish. As chosen favorite of the gods, I had to comport myself with dignity. Gingerly,
I picked up the net by the slack at one end, expecting the bird to quack itself into a frenzy.

It didn't move. A fat drip of liquid fell from the duck's body to the mud.

Slowly I untangled the bird. The netting was wet, even though I had set the trap on land, two paces from
the edge of the water. I looked at my hands; by starlight, the wetness on my skin seemed black. Lifting
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my fingers to my nose, I smelled blood.

The duck's body was cold.

When the bird was completely unwrapped, I let the net fall from my hands and walked back with my
catch to the stranger's campfire. The flames were almost out; I yanked some dry cattails off the nearest
bulrushes and threw them onto the embers. They flared into a fizzing yellow blaze that gave more than
enough light to examine the duck.

It was a mallard, its coloration male. Under its tail, however, was nothing but a mess of bloody guts
dangling where a knife had cut off a chunk of flesh.

Coloration or not, the duck wasn't male. Not anymore.

I grabbed the bird by its neck, swung it twice around my head, then threw it with all my strength. Its
wings fell open limply as it traveled, and dragged against the air; it barely cleared the reeds before it
splashed into open water. For a moment I stood there panting. Then I kicked at the cattails I'd thrown on
the fire. They scattered in a flurry of sparks, some hissing as they hit water. Methodically I walked
around the flats, stamping on burning cattail fluff and grinding it into the mud.

The stranger had castrated my duck. The duck sent to me by the gods. The duck telling me what sex the
gods wanted me to choose.

The duck had been cut neuter. Made a Neut.

I'd seen a Neut once. It was my earliest memory: a pale face, fat and blubbery, close to mine; and hands
lifting me up, heaving me off the ground. I screamed, terrified—I knew this monster wanted to kill me.