"Michael Moorcock - London, My Life or The Sedentary Jew" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

time of it. They were clearly from the same part of the world as me. They
wore some nice quality robes—tight weaving, well co-ordinated colours,
wool or cotton or a mixture of both. Gold bracelets and chains, rings with
precious stones, nice silver circlets holding their hoods on. Their travelling
chests also showed that they weren’t peasants. Solid cedar, big brass
fittings, names on the sides in Hebrew. Worth a bit, as I said to Joseph,
recommending the safest inn. He’d heard that the settlement was as crime
free as far as anywhere on the island was crime free at that time. Big
Roman presence. They were a thieving, sweet-talking lot those Brits, and
weren’t above murdering you in your bed if they could get away with it.
London was a new town then, based on a place called Lud’s Dun, after one
of their gods supposed to inhabit the hill above the river. Not much of a hill,
really. But the Roman engineers had fortified it, given it some pretty good
amenities and settled a bunch of their legionnaires there. It wasn’t bad
farming land, thanks to the Thames’s tendency to flood. It would be a while
before anyone started building serious artificial banks to improve the
navigation and save the somewhat vulnerable real estate as it improved in
value.

“You’re a long way from home,” I said, once I’d established they
spoke Hebrew, “what brings you to this Godforsaken neck of the woods?”

“We’re on a mission,” confided the woman who introduced herself as
the bearded oldster’s wife (she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five).
“We’re from Jerusalem. You know, where He was crucified and rose from
the dead.”

Nutters, I thought. Not many people now know that in Europe and
North Africa Britain was considered to be the America of its day. The Far
West, the frontier of the Empire, where you were free to make something
of yourself. Anyone who’d been persecuted for their religion (and frankly
there were a lot fewer persecutions at that time, the Romans being by and
large a practical lot, as are most pantheists) tended to set off for Albion with
plans to found a colony. The Romans had trouble getting anyone else to
settle there and it was part of their usual method to encourage trade and
industry wherever they could. You needed people to secure an Empire. Of
course, there was the usual official Temple of the Imperial Cult and a
temple to Diana on part of Ludgate Hill, but other religions were
encouraged, because every able-bodied man could be called up for the
army, if necessary. They needed people to help build roads. People to tax.
The native Britons by and large weren’t strong on that sort of
forward-looking work, still being excited about farming, especially growing
corn, which they were pretty good at. It hadn’t taken most of them long to
see the advantages of accepting the Romans, though I understood there
were still a few tribes up north who were more warlike and regarded us
Mediterranean types as interlopers, but this was more to do with
propaganda being fed them by their rulers. Once they saw the reality, they
tended to come in out of the cold and their rulers had no choice but to
comply, if they wanted to have people they could still rule, at least
nominally.