"Karen Wehrstein - Chevenga 01 - Lion's Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wehrstein Karen)

watched: the hilt, worn down to nothing by the touch of generations of
initiates and replaced uncounted times, the straight dark blade, never
used, the same she gave us. Hanging by chains, it stirred at my touch, and
then came up with my hands as I hefted it; all down the line of people
there was whispering. It was then I felt lost and frightened, to have so
easily moved something so sacred, and knew I had taken on something I
did not understand. But we cannot pray to her who lived a millennium
and a half ago. If we must ask the age-old question all Yeolis seem to at
one time or another, "Would she have taken me in?", the answer will never
come to us on the wind. Unless we feel our worth in our hearts, we are
without it.

So it was for my mother: they must stand aside helpless, the curse and
the duty of all parents; my strength unaided would decide it. I had had my
fair preparation, a good birth and my two days of having them all to
myself; now I must make good my claim to go on, alone. The Senaheral
placed their feet astride the stream, marking out a length of water just
below the cleft where it gushes out. My mother knelt beside it, unwrapped
me from my wool, and laid me in.

We are called barbarian for this. Often it is by people who keep slaves
and maintain tyrants, who practice human sacrifice or sport-killing, or
whose custom is to cut off the tenderest part a girl-child has, thinking that
for a woman to have pleasure is evil. Perhaps my reader is of such a people
and takes offense; then, like two striplings caught rolling in the dirt, we
must each be the other.

If I were a Lakan, then… these Yeolis with their baby-killing, doomed—
for what god would take into his hand a people who scorn paying the
sacred blood-price, yet freeze to death babies without dedicating a
finger-bone to the Almighty? Such impiety will bring down the Earned
Fire upon them again…

Or an Arkan: without gods, giving their heirs to the whims of chance,
as if chance has better judgment than a good sensible father! All Yeolis
are milksops to their hairy-chested wives, without the testicular juice to
choose which children they will keep, let alone correct or purify those
women…

Having played you, I am in my rights to ask you to play me. Having so
done we will both see truth: that barbarism is in the heart of the beholder
as beauty in the eye. Who, therefore, am I to call you barbarian, or you to
call me? If there is some race on the Earthsphere perfect by all standards,
let them call the rest of us barbarian.
 Let the custom be judged by its justice. It is true that many other Yeoli
families have given it up, since we increased enough not to interbreed, and
life got easier. But I was born to serve my people; should we not take
customary pains at least to give them good? It was just to me too, to
whom trials harder than most Yeolis' awaited. If I were too weak, why let
my failure or my death wait till I was old enough to understand what