"02 - The Song of Homana (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Jennifer)

for making mine better

First Printing, July 1985

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PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




PART I

ONE

I peered through the storm, trying to see Finn. He rode
ahead on a small Steppes pony much like my own, though
brown instead of dun, little more than an indistinct lump
of darkness in the blowing snow. The wind beat against
my face; Finn would not hear me unless I shouted against
it. I pulled the muffling wraps of woo! away from my face,
grimacing as the bitter wind blew ice crystals into my
beard, and shouted my question to him.
' "Do you see anything?"

The indistinct lump became more distinct as Finn turned
back in the saddle. Like me, he wore leather and wool and
furs, hooded and wrapped, hardly a man underneath all
the layers. But then Finn was not what most men would
name a man at all, being Cheysuli.

He pulled wrappings from his face. Unlike me, he wore
no beard in an attempt at anonymity; the Cheysuli cannot
grow them. Something in the blood, Finn had said once,
kept them from it. But what he did not have on his face
was made up for on his head, Finn's hair, of late infre-
quently cut, was thick and black. It blew in the wind,
baring a sun-bronzed predator's face.

"1 have sent Storr ahead to seek shelter," he called back
to me. "Is there such a place in all this snow, he will find
it."

Instantly my eyes went to the side of the narrow forest
track. There, parallelling the hoolprints of our horses—

I 11 I

12 Jennifer Robarson

though glimpsed only briefly in the blowing snow and