"David Zindell - Requiem of Homo Sapiens 01 - The Broken God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

birth, and Haidar and Chandra adopted you. That is why you are
different from your brothers and sisters. Most men of the City
look as you do, Danlo.'
Danlo's throat ached so badly he could barely speak. He
rubbed his eyes and said simply, 'My blood parents ... There
are others who look like me, yes?'
'Yes, in the Unreal City. It is not shaida to have a face
such as yours; you did not bring this shaida to our people.'
Soli's explanation cooled Danlo's shame of being left alive.
But it brought to mind a hundred other questions. 'Why did my
blood parents come to Kweitkel? Why? Why wasn't I born Devaki
as all Devaki are born? Why, sir?'
'You don't remember?'
Danlo shut his burning eyes against the oilstone's light. He
remembered something. He had an excellent memory, in some ways
a truly remarkable memory. He had inherited his mother's
'memory of pictures': when he closed his eyes, he could conjure
up in exact colour and contour almost every event of his life.
Once, two winters
21
ago, against Haidar's warnings, he had rashly gone out to hunt
silk belly by himself. A silk belly boar had found him in a
copse of young shatterwood trees; the boar had charged and laid
open his thigh with his tusk before Danlo could get his spear
up. He was lucky to be alive, but it wasn't his luck that he
most remembered. No, what he saw whenever he thought about that
day was Chandra's fine needlework as she sewed shut his wound.
He could see the bone needle pulling through the bloody,
stretched-out skin, the precision stitching, each loop of the
distinctive knot Chandra used to tie off his wound. Inside him
was a whole universe of such knots of memories, but for some
reason, he had almost no memory of the first four years of his
life. Somewhere deep inside there was a faint image of a man, a
man with piercing blue eyes and a sad look on his face. He
couldn't bring the image to full clarity, though; he couldn't
quite see it.
He opened his eyes to see Soli staring at him. He drew his
furs up around his naked shoulders. 'What did my father look
like?' he asked. 'Did you know my father? My mother? The mother
of my blood?'
Soli sipped the last of his tea and bent to pour himself
another cup. 'Your father looked like you,' he said. Then his
face fell silent as if he were listening to something, some
animal cry or sound far away. 'Your father, with his long nose,
and the hair – he never combed his hair. Yes, the wildness,
too. But you have your mother's eyes. She could see things
clearly, your mother.'
'You must have known them very well, if they lived with the
tribe. Haidar must have known them, too.'
Danlo closed his eyes again and tried to shut out the wind