"George R. R. Martin - And Seven Times Never Kill Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

shall tell you, when the god looks down on us. Until then, we shall trade."
He rose abruptly, gave a swift glance at the pyramid across the pool, and
faded into the forest, still holding the laser.
NeKrol sighed. He had a long wait before him; the prayer assemblies
never came until sundown. He moved to the edge of the pool and unlaced
his heavy boots to soak his sweaty, calloused feet in the crisp cold waters.
When he looked up, the first of the carvers had arrived; a lithe young
Jaenshi female with a touch of auburn in her body fur. Silent (they were
all silent in neKrol's presence, all save the talker), she offered him her
work.
It was a statuette no larger than his fist, a heavy-breasted fertility
goddess fashioned out of the fragrant, thin-veined blue wood of the fruit
trees. She sat cross-legged on a triangular base, and three thin slivers of
bone rose from each corner of the triangle to meet above her head in a
blob of clay.
 NeKrol took the carving, turned it this way and that, and nodded his
approval. The Jaenshi smiled and vanished, taking the salt brick with her.
Long after she was gone. neKrol continued to admire his acquisition. He
had traded all his life, spending ten years among the squid-faced gethsoids
of Aath and four with the stick-thin Fyndii, traveling a trader's circuit to a
half-dozen stone age planets that had once been slaveworlds of the broken
Hrangan Empire; but nowhere had he found artists like the Jaenshi. Not
for the first time, he wondered why neither Kleronomas nor Chung had
mentioned the native carvings. He was glad they hadn't, though, and fairly
certain that once the dealers saw the crates of wooden gods he had sent
back with Ryther, the world would be overrun by traders. As it was, he had
been sent here entirely on speculation, in hopes of finding a Jaenshi drug
or herb or liquor that might move well in stellar trade. Instead he'd found
the art, like an answer to a prayer.
Other workmen came and went as the morning turned to afternoon and
the afternoon to dusk, setting their craft before him. He looked over each
piece carefully, taking some and declining others, paying for what he took
in salt. Before full darkness had descended, a small pile of goods sat by his
right hand; a matched set of redstone knives, a gray deathcloth woven
from the fur of an elderly Jaenshi by his widow and friends (with his face
wrought upon it in the silky golden hairs of a pseudomonk), a bone spear
with tracings that reminded neKrol of the runes of Old Earth legend; and
statues. The statues were his favorites, always; so often alien art was alien
beyond comprehension, but the Jaenshi workmen touched emotional
chords in him. The gods they carved, each sitting in a bone pyramid, wore
Jaenshi faces, yet at the same time seemed archetypically human:
stern-faced war gods, things that looked oddly like satyrs, fertility
goddesses like the one he had bought, almost-manlike warriors and
nymphs. Often neKrol had wished that he had a formal education in extee
anthropology, so that he might write a book on the universals of myth. The
Jaenshi surely had a rich mythology, though the talkers never spoke of it;
nothing else could explain the carvings. Perhaps the old gods were no
longer worshipped, but they were still remembered.
By the time the Heart of Bakkalon went down and the last reddish rays
ceased to filter through the looming trees, neKrol had gathered as much as