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

said.
He helped Danlo sit up and wrapped him in a fresh shagshay
skin. There was blood everywhere, dark red soaking into the
white furs. Danlo looked through the flickering red fires up
at the circle of skulls. He must find the one animal who was
his doffel. Soli would help him if his vision faltered, but it
would be better if he came to his other-self unaided and
alone.
'Danlo, can you see?'
'Yes.'
He was six thousand feet above men and time. He turned his
head in a half-circle, and he could see many things. Below him
were the dark forest and the starlit hills of his childhood,
and farther out where the island's ragged shore came up
against the ocean, he beheld the faint, silvery shimmer of sea
ice falling off to infinity. There were nearer
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sights. Soli's face was drawn out ghastly and pale; he looked
at once fey and ill, as if he were ready to die. Pain is the
awareness of life, Danlo thought. His body still burned with
pain, but his spirit had begun the journey through pain into a
deeper world. He was beginning to see himself as he really was.
Every act of his passage had been designed to bring him to this
moment. His childish picture of himself, his old ways of
thinking – shattered, like ice crystals beneath a hammer stone.
There was a sudden clarity, an intensity of colour, shape, and
meaning. Far above him, in the sky, the stars burned with a
pale blue fire, and nearer, spread over his thighs and belly,
was his deep red blood. Again, he looked up at the circle of
skulls, at the bits of ivory gleaming in the blackness. Each
skull was his skull; life was connected to life in ways he was
just beginning to see. One skull, though, seemed to shimmer
under the watchful eyes of the Old Ones. One skull called out
to him. It was the skull of Ahira, the snowy owl. Ahira, the
wisest and wildest of the animals. No other animal was so alive
and free. And no other animal was so perilous to one's spirit.
In truth, he dreaded discovering that Ahira was his doffel, his
other-self, for only once in ten generations was one born whose
other-self is Ahira. He stared on and on waiting for this
splendid bird to stop calling him, but at last he was sure that
Ahira was his doffel. Ahira must guide him and help him go over
to the trackless, unknown world where his deepest self lived.
Soli saw Danlo gazing at Ahira's small, round skull. That
the Devaki fathers had acquired a skull at all was something of
a miracle, for Ahira was the rarest of all birds and hunters
did not often catch sight of him. 'This bird?' Soli said. 'Are
you sure, Danlo?'
'Yes,' Danlo said. 'Ahira, the snowy owl.'
'Full men know this bird as the white thallow. You should
call him that, too.'