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

blow, chilling him to the core, and he despaired because he
felt himself falling through a black bottomless night from
which there is no escape. Fear is the consciousness of the
child – he remembered Haidar saying this once when they were
lost out at sea. He stared up at the brilliant stars, waiting
for the Beast to cut him, or tear open his throat, and in a
moment of exhilaration he realized that he was here to
surrender up his fear, or rather,
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to lose a part of himself, to let die his childish conception
of himself as a separate being terrified of the world. All men
must be tested this way, he knew, or else they could never
become full men. Just then the Beast roared something into the
night, a huge, angry sound that rattled the skulls surrounding
him. He felt his foreskin being pulled away from the bulb of
his membrum, and there was a tearing, hot pain. He clenched his
jaws so hard he thought his teeth would break off in splinters
and be driven into his gums; his muscles strained to rip apart
his bones, and instantly, his eyes were burning so badly he
could not see. He could still hear, though, and in many ways
that was the worst of it, the crunching, ripping sound of his
foreskin being torn away from his membrum. It hurts! he
silently screamed. Oh, God, it hurts! The pain was a red flame
burning up his membrum into his belly and spine. The pain ate
him alive; the world was nothing but fire and pain. There came
a moment when his body was like a single nerve connected to a
vastly greater ganglia and webwork of living things: trees and
stars and the wolves howling in the valleys below. He could
hear the death scream of churo and yaga, and all the animals he
had ever killed exploding from his own throat; he remembered
the story of a Patwin boy who had died during his passage, and
he felt a sudden pressure below his ribs, as if a spear or claw
had pierced his liver. In one blinding moment, he saw again the
faces, of each member of his tribe as they prayed to be freed
of the slow evil. The hurt of all these peoples and things, and
everything, flowed into him like a river of molten stone. He
ached to move, to scream, to pull himself up and run away. Only
now, wholly consumed by the terrible pain that is the awareness
of life, he was no longer afraid. Beyond pain, there was only
death. Death was the left hand of life, and suddenly he beheld
its long, cold fingers and deep lines with a clarity of vision
that astonished him. Seen from one perspective, death was cruel
and dreadful like a murderer's hand held over a baby's face;
but from
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another, death was as familiar and non-frightening as the
whorls of his father's open palm. He would die, tonight or ten
thousand nights hence – he could almost see the moment when
the light would flee his eyes and join all the other lights in
the sky. Even now, as the Beast tore at him, he was dying, but