"Van Lustbader, Eric - Pearl 01 The Ring of Five Dragons(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

"Regard!" He held up his game. "I killed two ice-hares."
"With my longbow?" Giyan said as she took the weapon from him. "You never accessed your okummmon? Not once?"
Kurgan snorted as he dangled his two-brace of gimnopedes in their faces. "If he had, he would not have had to rely on luck."
"Luck has nothing to do with using the longbow," Giyan said. "It's a matter of skill."
Kurgan laughed scornfully. "As if I should listen to you!"
"It would not harm you to do so," Giyan said calmly.
Kurgan cocked his head. His face wore a smug grin. "Following that logic, I should listen also to the nattering of the three-fingered sloth as it swings from the trees."
"The three-fingered sloth holds secrets in her head you could not imagine."
"Oh, yes!" Kurgan was laughing outright. It was clear that he could not help himself. "Like how sore her tender parts are from defecating!"
Annon searched her face as Kurgan turned and went toward the scullery, there to throw his catch upon the thick wooden chopping block. Perhaps he was fearful of recognizing the same expression that he had seen on the girl's face in the creek.
But Giyan held her ground with the courage of a V'ornn. She wore the floor-length garment of deepest maroon—the regent's color—that all the women of the hingatta lьina da mori were required to wear. Color marked the uniform of the Tuskugggun. Around her hips wound a sash of night-black woven silk, another swath of the same silk held her thick copper-colored hair back from her face, binding it so that it hung in a heavy oval, the tip of which brushed her between her shoulder blades. She kept her head uncovered, unlike V'ornn women, who were required to wear the traditional sifeyn, a kind of heavy cowl. This was widely seen as an uncivilized act of defiance on her part. Decent Tuskugggun simply did not parade around in public with their heads bared. That kind of erotic provocation was best left for the bedroom—or for the Looorm—Tuskugggun whose business was bartering their bodies to V'ornn males of all castes. Just as shocking, the sleeveless dress also exposed the fine down on her arms. In short, to say that even after all these years she remained the object of intense curiosity was perhaps something of an understatement. Even here in hingatta lьina do mori, the Tuskugggun watched her covertly with a curious mixture of contempt and envy.
"Would you continue to laugh were I to best you with the longbow?" she said to Kurgan's back.
At this, the Tuskugggun looked up from their painting, designing, composing, forging, or the chores they were performing for their children. As with all Kundalan-built structures in Axis Tyr, the V'ornn had transformed the beautiful asymmetrical space with its central atrium open to the elements into utilitarian cubicles—in this case, to allow the eight women who made up the hingatta to work and live with their children. Where gardens had once grown more cubicles had been built, the myriad altars to Mьna had been ripped out, and the maddening labyrinthine layout had been replaced by a mathematically precise pattern. As in every aspect of V'ornn society the sizes of the cubicles were dictated by a strict hierarchical pattern relating to a complex formula that measured skill, seniority, and kinship.
Giyan, being the caretaker of the regent's only son, was in possession of the largest suite of cubicles. This would have rankled the Tuskugggun even if she had not been Kundalan. The irony of this state of affairs was that Giyan had no great desire for the larger space, would have gladly exchanged it for another had such a thing been allowed in V'ornn society.
Now the Tuskugggun rose as one and entered the central atrium where she stood with the two boys. If Giyan was aware of their scrutiny, she did not reveal as much. Instead, she kept her gaze fixed upon the open doorway to the scullery.
Soon enough, Kurgan sauntered back with a nonchalance that only Annon identified as false. It was Kurgan who took especial note of the complete attention that had come to him like a high-profit deal. The power waxed inside of him like the sun at midday. "And how would you offer such implausible proof to V'ornn satisfaction?"
"I would propose a contest of arrows."
"A contest, eh?" There was that cunning glint of the snow-lynx in Kurgan's night-black eyes. "I thirst for contests."
"That is unsurprising," Giyan said neutrally. "No V'ornn can resist one."
"You being the expert." He went to where she had set the longbow against the limestone wall and hefted it. He grinned, sure of himself now. "On behalf of the V'ornn, I accept." He walked over to where Annon stood and held out the Kundalan longbow. "I will use my okum-mmon and your master-child will use this inferior—"
The words died in his throat as Giyan plucked the longbow out of his grasp. "Your contest is with me."
"With you? You cannot be serious."
"I am perfectly serious. You will use your aberrant V'ornn link and I will use this" She lifted the longbow over her head.
"You mock me, slave! I reject this farce!"
"But no, you cannot." Giyan made a sweeping gesture. "In front of the entire hingatta you accepted."
"But I—"
"She is right, Kurgan," Annon said. "You accepted."
Kurgan felt betrayed. Why had Annon taken the Kundalan slave's side? Could he actually feel something for this inferior creature simply because she had suckled him, nursed him, tended to his needs? That is what Tuskugggun did with their lives. One did not take the side of the help. Perhaps Annon spoke so as a bit of mischief to humiliate him. In any event, Kurgan could see that he wasn't going to get any.help from Annon. He looked around from face to face. It was clear to him that none of the Tuskugggun would raise a voice in protest, not even his mother. Well, what could you expect from females, he thought bitterly. They would not contradict Giyan directly; but behind her back they were oh so adept at tearing her to ribbons. And then another thought came to him: what if they were as afraid of the Kundalan sorceress as he was? This caused a sharp stab of anger to impale him. Afraid? Of a Kundalan? It was shamefull. He was eldest son of Wennn Stogggul, Prime Factor of the Bashkir! He would take on any alien sorcery and crush it beneath his boot soles. He had the okummmon; he was linked with the Gyrgon.
"I accepted, it is truth," Kurgan said, glaring at Giyan. "The contest is sealed."
"Sealed, then," murmured the Tuskugggun and their offspring as one. "For good or for ill."
Idiots! Kurgan thought as he grabbed a handful of bolts. "Outside," he said, hoping it sounded like a command.
"Wherever you prefer," Giyan told him. She was about to strap a square quiver full of arrows across her back, when Kurgan stayed her hand.
"A moment," he said. He pulled the arrows out and inspected them, an offense that would have spawned a decades-long blood feud had she been a V'ornn. Though she was the regent's mistress and had been granted certain rights above other Kundalan, she was what she was, doubtless too backward to have the V'ornn's keenly civilized sense of honor and disgrace. Did an animal care where it shat? Of course not. And no civilized person expected it to.
Outside, the architectural order of the city was striking. Beneath a cloudless cerulean sky neat rows of two-story buildings of rose-and-blue limestone with kiln-fired green-glazed tile roofs lined cobbled streets that radiated from a central plaza like the spokes of a wheel or the rays of the sun. At the heart of this open space stood the regent's palace, a structure of bronze-and-gold spires, red-enameled minarets, carved cinnamon-colored walls whose overall appearance was altogether too ethereal for V'ornn tastes. A wide avenue, neatly bisecting the octag- onal plaza, ran due south to Harborside with its kilometers-long Promenade where the Chuun River, which skirted the city to the west, spilled its seed into the Sea of Blood. Merchants and traders of every description filled Harborside, a rough-and-tumble neighborhood where could be found the only enclave of Sarakkon on the northern continent. The Sarakkon were a wild, piratical race inhabiting Kundala's southern continent. The V'ornn had long ago judged them insignificant, their land so devoid of decent natural resources it was not worth occupying. Besides, it contained pockets of radiation, making it unfit for even the hardiest of Khagggun. The V'ornn appeared to tolerate Sarakkonian presence, even occasionally trading with them, for the Gyrgon were possessed of an interest in materials of their manufacture.
One hundred and one years ago, when the V'ornn had come, no walls encircled Axis Tyr, there were no ramparts from which sentries might espy an oncoming enemy. You could see, depending on which section of the city you were in, the sysal forest to the east, the Great Phosphorus Marsh to the west, to the north the Chuun River flowing down from the foothills of the Djenn Marre, and to the south the Sea of Blood.
"So open!" the V'ornn shuddered when they first occupied the city. "So vulnerable to attack." It was unthinkable for them to inhabit a place thus unfortified. In consequence, thousands of Kundalan had labored for a full year to construct a V'ornn wall around the city. The wall was hewn from massive blocks of the same black basalt the Kundalan has used to build the Promenade. The V'ornn, obsessed with their safety and security, drove the workers to their tolerance level and beyond. Hundreds of Kundalan perished, an unseemly and grisly foundation, but one which the V'ornn found to be another appropriate deterrent to insurrection.
The V'ornn wall was fully thirteen meters thick at its base, tapering to just over eight meters at its apex. It rose twenty meters above street level, making of the city a prison. The whereabouts of Kundalan, including their passage in and out of the three gates at the western, northern and eastern boundaries of the wall, was monitored through the use of an okuuut, a subcutaneous identity implant embedded in the flesh of the left palm. Each okuuut was synchronized to the individual beat-rate and harmonics of the Kundalan who wore it, making identification virtually instantaneous.
Now, all the members of hingatta lьina do mori were in the courtyard that fronted a wide avenue that ran straight to the regent's palace, a thousand meters to the north. Kurgan and Giyan stood facing one another while the others spread out in a semicircle around them. Almost immediately, as if to preempt her opponent, Giyan strode off fifty paces. With the point of one of her arrows she scored a thin vertical line in the rough bark of a sysal tree. "There," she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. "The target." As she watched Kurgan fitting a bolt to his okummmon she could see that her voice had drawn the attention of those nearby. By the time she returned to stand beside the V'ornn a sizable crowd had formed. And why not? It wasn't any day that a Kun-dalan—and the regent's mistress, at that!—challenged a V'ornn.
Giyan lifted an arm in Kurgan's direction. "You have the honor."
With an almost contemptuous sneer on his face, Kurgan lifted his arm to the horizontal. It was a casual motion, no more, surely, than if he were giving directions to a traveler who had lost his way. He barely seemed to look at the tree and the bolt was loosed in a whir and a blur. In an instant, it had sunk home right in the center of the line Giyan had scored in the bark.
"Perfect!" he cried in a tone of voice that brought instant applause from every V'ornn watching. Now he turned to Giyan and, in a coarse parody of a courtly manner, said: "The honor is now yours."
As Giyan took up her bow, he said: "It would give me pleasure to sight for you."
"I am certain it would," she answered amid a chorus of V'ornn laughter, a rough, raucous, beastly noise that grated on sensitive Kundalan ears. "But I do not intend to lose." This last brought a low, melodious soughing from the sprinkling of Kundalan in the crowd. Giyan took a moment to regard them out of the corner of her eye. She did not mistake their positive reaction for love of her. She was the regent's mistress. Perhaps they despised her an iota less than their V'ornn masters. But it was also entirely possible that they hated her even more, for surely they had marked her as a collaborator.
These were her people, and yet, when she looked at them, bedraggled and forlorn, she felt nothing—or next to nothing. Perhaps they were right about her, for the truth was that she seemed at home with the V'ornn—or at least with Eleusis and Annon. She did not long for her village of Stone Border, the chaotic furor of the packed-dirt streets, the constant tension from V'ornn raids, the terror of their random and capricious murders and beatings of innocent Kundalan.
Truth to tell, Giyan's Gift had made her feel like an outsider at the Abbey of Floating White where she and Bartta had been trained as Ramahan priestesses. Kundalan life had begun to break down, and the sporadic raids perpetrated by Khagggun packs terrorized the countryside into a state of semiparalysis. Here in Axis Tyr there was, at least, order and an overarching sense of purpose. Of course, it was V'ornn order and V'ornn purpose. But the regent, Eleusis Ashera, was unlike the majority of V'ornn, on that fact she would stake her life. He did not view Kundalan as inferior, as slaves disposable as food, animals without souls (this was the V'ornn view of the universe, not the Kundalan, who knew that every animal possessed unique knowledge as well as a unique soul). This was why he had treated her as his love, not as his property as the other V'ornn supposed. In the utter privacy of the palace, he allowed her to worship Mьna, to mix the potions and poultices that healed and mended him and Annon, to practice the element-magic that was her birthright. Above all, he did not question her Kundalan heart, but rather sought to understand it. These were, among others, their secrets, each one of which, should it fall on an unfriendly or jealous ear, would doom him even—he felt—with the Gyrgon who held him in such great esteem.
And this was why he had been intent on creating the great experiment of Za Hara-at—had risked the enmity of Wennn Stogggul along with many other V'ornn of both Great and Lesser Castes—so that he could fashion the first city in which V'ornn and Kundalan traded freely, exchanged information, learned from one another.
Giyan's reverie was abruptly terminated as she became aware that every eye in the crowd was focused on her. And what a throng it had become! She drew an arrow from her quiver, stroked her fingertips along its smooth, straight length, notched it to her bow.
"I don't know why you bother," Kurgan said. "You will have to split my bolt to win. Your arrow cannot scratch V'ornn alloy. Concede defeat now and avoid unnecessary humiliation."
Giyan smiled sweetly, aimed at the tree and pulled back the bowstring to its very limit. A hush fell over the crowd. Then she raised the bow until the arrow was pointing just shy of vertical and let fly.
"Are you insane?" Kurgan said as the arrow arced into the sky. He turned to the expectant crowd. "She is insane, my friends. You can see with your own eyes. Utterly and completely insane."