"Jay Lake - Real North" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

Real North
by Jay Lake
What always was

A thirty day slog beyond the crest of the Rimerock Range, weather's frigid enough for the wind to freeze
out and fall as dry, burning snow. Some proconsul back in the days of the Purple Empire sent men up this
way to measure the air and the progress of the suns. When you come out of Last Pass there's a bronze
stele they set up to mark where it can get that cold. There's writing on it, and glyphs, in six languages,
four of them lost, but they all say the same thing:

The world ends here

Even though there's mountains beyond mountains, walls of ice two miles high, waterfalls frozen diamond
bright and knife-sharp, the world does end there. Stand on the south side of the stele, you're so far north
the suns ride the horizon like magnets on an Oelian gaming table. So far north the next day's sun can be
seen coming from the infinite east before the last one has vanished into the infinite west.

South of the world, of course, is ocean beyond measure. Only here in the north is the world bounded by
a border. This where the Real North begins.



At the end

"Knew a man oncet," said Jadetooth. Big fellow, greasy as a bear haunch, wore more layers of fur than a
cannibal otter. He didn't say much, generally, spent words like they was breath to a drowning man. He
grinned across the tiny cookfire. You didn't go with big flames in the Real North unless you were longing
for unexpected company and maybe an early death.

Not a lot of late deaths up here, though, come to speak of it.

Facing away from the fire, Gristle grunted. "Ate a man once." He snorted, almost a laugh, probably
rolling his moonmilk wall-eye. "Raw."

"Shame to let good meat go to waste," Polder said. He was cook tonight, tending the pot for three of
them. It was Gristle's turn to scan the darkness of the cave mouth.

Jadetooth was mostly watching the theater within his head, it seemed. He ignored them both, choosing
instead to speak to the fire. "Be walkin' east erst he could 'member."

Polder tapped in a little of their precious salt. "He ever get there? I figure direction is all in where you're
standing."

"Man can walk thirty miles a day," said Gristle. "Twenty thousand days in a man's life, that's, uh, thirty
thousand miles."

In went the radishes they'd found almost a week back growing by a hot spring. "Six hundred thousand
miles, actually. But who's counting?"

"North." Jadetooth stared in the fire some more. "North."