"Harry Harrison - Captive Universe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

Of course the women cried the best, wailing and tearing at their braided hair until it came loose and hung
in lank yellow strands about their shoulders. When their tears slowed or stopped, the men beat them with
straw-filled bags.
Someone brushed against Chimal's leg, pressing a warm and yielding flank against him. He moved further
down the row, but a moment later the pressure had returned. It was Malinche, a girl with a round face,
round eyes, a round figure. She stared, wide-eyed, up at him while she cried. Her mouth was open so he
could see the black gap in the white row of her upper teeth, she had bit on a stone in her beans and
broke it when she was a child, and her eyes streamed and her nose ran with the intensity of her emotions.
She was still almost a child, but she had turned sixteen and was therefore a woman. In sudden rage he
began to beat her about the shoulders and back with his bag. She did not pull away, or appear to notice
it at all, while her tear-filled round eyes still stared at him, as pale blue and empty of warmth as the winter
sky.

Old Atototl passed in the next row, carrying a plump eating dog to the priest. Since he was the cacique,
the leading man in Quilapa, this was his privilege. Chimal pushed his way into the crowd as they all turned
to follow. At the edge of the field Citlallatonac waited, a fearful sight in his filthy black robe, spattered all
over with blood, and thick with embroidered skulls and bones along the bottom edge where it trailed in
the dust. Atototl came up to him, arms extended, and the two old men bent over the wriggling puppy. It
looked up at them, its tongue out and panting in the heat, while Citlallatonac, as first priest this was his
duty, plunged his black obsidian knife into the little animal's chest. Then, with practiced skill, he tore out
its still beating heart and held it high as sacrifice to Tlaloc, letting the blood spatter among the stalks of
corn.

There was nothing more then that could be done. Yet the sky was still a cloudless bowl of heat. By ones
and twos the villagers straggled unhappily from the fields and Chimal, who always walked alone, was not
surprised to find Malinche beside him. She placed her feet down heavily and walked in silence, but only
for a short while.

"Now the rains will come," she said with bland assurance. "We have wept and prayed and the priest has
sacrificed."

But we always weep and pray, he thought, and the rains come or do not come. And the priests in the
temple will eat well tonight, good fat dog. Aloud he said, "The rains will come."

"I am sixteen," she said, and when he did not answer she added, "I make good tortillas and I am strong.
The other day we had no masa and the com was not husked and there was even no lime water to make
the masa to make the tortillas, so my mother said…"

Chimal was not listening. He stayed inside himself and let the sound of her voice go by him like the wind,
with as much effect They walked on together toward the village. Something moved above, drifting out of
the glare of the sun and sliding across the sky toward the gray wall of the western cliffs beyond the
houses. His eyes followed it, a zopilote going toward that ledge on the cliff… Though his eyes stayed
upon the soaring bird his mind slithered away from it. The cliff was not important nor were the birds
important: they meant nothing to him. Some things did not bear thinking about. His face was grim and
unmoving as they walked on, yet in his thoughts was a twist of hot irritation. The sight of the bird and the
memory of the cliff that night—it could be forgotten but not with Malinche's prying away at him. "I like
tortillas," he said when he became aware that the voice had stopped.

"The way I like to eat them best…" the voice started up again, spurred by his interest, and he ignored it.
But the little arrowhead of annoyance in his head did not go away, even when he turned and left Malinche