"Patrick Tilley - Amtrak 1 - Cloud Warrior" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tilley Patrick)

upon it whenever they emerged from the darkness; yet in spite of their
awesome reputation - or perhaps because of it - he yearned to confront
them; to challenge them.

So far, they had not ventured into the lands of the Plainfolk. But the
Sky Voices had told Mr Snow that the time of their coming was near.

The first sign would be arrowheads in the sky; the birdwings that
carried the cloud warriors on their journeys. They were the far-seeing
eyes of the iron snake which followed, bearing more sand-burrowers in
its belly. When they came, there would be a great dying. The world
would weep but all the tears in the sky would not wash the blood of the
Plainfolk from the earth.

When Mr Snow had finished telling his story to the children, he walked
down to where Cadillac sat with his face turned up to the sky and
squatted cross-legged on an adjoining rock. His long white hair was
drawn up into atop-knot, tied and threaded with ribbon; the aging skin
covering his lean, hard body was patterned with random swirls, patches
and spots of black, three shades of brown - from dark to light and an
even lighter olive-pink.

Mr Snow had said that the bodies of the sand-burrowers were the same
colour all over. Olive-pink from the top of their heads to the soles
of their feet. Like worms.

Cadillac's body was marked with a similar random pattern but his skin
was as smooth as a raven's wing. Some of Mr Snow's skin was smooth too
but in other places, such as his forehead, shoulders and forearms, the
skin was lumpy as if it had pebbles stuffed underneath, or it was
shrivelled up like a dead leaf or the gnarled bark of a tree, That was
the way most Mutes were born. And many were different to Cadillac in
other ways too. As a young child, when Cadillac finally became aware
that his body was different from those of his clan-brothers, he had
felt ashamed; a grotesque outcast. Some of the other children taunted
him, saying he had a body like a sand-burrower. He became alienated
from his peer group; ran away; was brought back; fell sick, refused to
eat.

Black-Wing, his mother, had taken him to Mr Snow who explained that the
things he hated about himself were precious differences that would, in
the years to come, enable him to perform great feats of valour. That
was why he had been made straight and strong as the Heroes of the Old
Time, and had been given a Name of Power. Cadillac, then four years
old, had sat listening wide-eyed as, in the flickering firelight under
a dark sky heavy with shimmering stars, Mr Snow had revealed to him the
Talisman Prophecy.

F. from that moment, Cadillac knew, with a childlike certainty he had
never lost, that everything that happened to him had a meaning, and