"Edgar Pangborn - The Golden Horn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pangborn Edgar)

it at once, while you still have the chance.

****

Moha, where I was born, is mainly a nation of farms, grouped around their
stockade village throughout the hill and lake and forest country. I grew up in
Skoar, one of Moha’s three cities, which lies in a cup of the hills near the
Katskil border. Even there things moved with the seasons and the Corn
Market trade; wilderness whispers at the city’s borders, except where the
two roads, the Northwest and the East, carry their double stream of men,
mule-wagons, soldiers, tinkers, wanderers.

Farming’s heartbreak work in Moha, same as everywhere. The stock
give birth to as many mues as anywhere else, the labor’s long sweat and
toil and disappointment wearing a man down to old age in the thirties, few
farmers ever able to afford a slave. But the people scrape along, as I’ve
seen human beings do in places worse than Moha. I’m older, I’ve traveled,
I’ve learned to write and read in spite of that mystery’s being reserved to
the priests. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if Moha wasn’t the happiest
land I ever knew.

The other cities—I’ve never visited them—are Moha City and Kanhar,
both in the northwest on Moha Water. Their harbors can take big vessels up
to thirty tons, the ships that trade with Levannon and the Katskil ports on the
Hudson Sea. Moha City is the capital and Kanhar is the largest, twenty
thousand population not counting slaves. Fifty miles south of Kanhar is
Skoar, and there I was born squalling and redheaded in one of those
houses that are licensed but still supposed not to exist. In such places they
don’t have time for kids, but since I was a well-formed chunk of humanity
and not a mue, the policers took me from my mother, whoever she was,
when I was weaned, and dumped me in the Skoar orphanage, where I
stayed until I was nine, old enough to earn a living.

I’m thinking now of a day in middle March when I was past fourteen,
and slipped away before dawn from the Bull and Iron where I worked as
yardboy, bondservant of course, two dollars a week and board. I was
merely goofing off. We’d gone through a tough winter with smallpox and flu,
near-about everything except the lumpy plague, and a real snow in January
almost an inch deep—I’ve never seen such a heavy fall of it before or
since. There was even a frost in February; people called it unusual. In the
stable loft where I slept I just thought it was damn cold. I remember looking
out the loft window one January morning and seeing icicles on the sign over
the inn door—a noble sign, painted for Old Jon Robson by some
journeyman artist who likely got bed and a meal out of it along with the
poverty talk that Old Jon saved for such occasions. A fine red bull with
tremendous horns, tremendous everything, and for the iron there was a
long spear sticking out of his neck and he not minding it a bit.

The wolves sharpnosed in close that winter. Mostly grays but a pack
of blacks wiped out an entire farm family in Wilton Village near Skoar. Old