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

to see the oilstone burnt low and its light nearly
extinguished. He always welcomed morning. It was always very
cold, but always the air was clear, and the eastern sky was
full of light, and the blessed mountain, Kweitkel, was every
day vanishingly smaller behind him.
For twenty-nine days he travelled due east without mishap or
incident. A civilized man making such a journey would have
been bored by the monotony of ice and the seamless blue sky.
But Danlo was not yet civilized; in his spirit he was wholly
Alaloi, wholly taken with the elements of the world. And to
his eyes there were many, many things to look at, not just sky
and ice. There was soreesh, the fresh powder snow that fell
every four or five days. When the wind blew out of the west
and packed the snow so that it was fast and good for sledding,
it became safel. The Alaloi have a hundred words for snow. To
have a word for an object, idea or feeling is to distinguish
that thing from all others, to enable one to perceive its
unique qualities. For the Alaloi, as for all peoples, words
literally create things, or rather, they create the way our
minds divide and categorize the indivisible wholeness of the
world into things. Too often, words determine what we do and
do not see.
Ice and sky, sky and ice – when he awoke on the thirtieth
morning of his journey, the ice surrounding his hut was
ilka-so, frozen in a lovely, wind-driven ripple pattern.
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Farther out were bands of ilka-rada, great blocks of
aquamarine ice heaved up by the contractions of the freezing
sea. The sky itself was not purely blue; in places, at various
times of the day, high above, there was a yellowish glare from
light reflected off the snowfields. And the snowfields were not
always white; sometimes, colonial algae and other organisms
spread out through the top layers of snow and coloured it with
violets and blues. These growths were called iceblooms,
urashin, and Danlo could see the faint purple of the iceblooms
off in the distance where the world curved into the sky.
Kitikeesha birds were a white cloud above the iceblooms. The
kitikeesha were snow eaters; at this time of the year, they
made their living by scooping snow into their yellow bills and
eating the snowworms, which in turn lived on the algae. (The
furry, tunnelling sleekits, which could be found near any
island or piece of land, also ate snow; sleekits would eat
anything: algae, snowworms, or even snowworm droppings.) Danlo
liked to stand with his hand shielding his eyes, looking at the
iceblooms. Looking for Ahira. Sometimes, the snowy owls
followed the kitikeesha flocks and preyed upon them. Ahira was
always glad to sink his talons into a nice, plump kitikeechick,
but on the thirtieth morning, Danlo looked for his doffel in
vain. Ahira, he knew, was very wise and would not fly when a
storm was near. 'Ahira, Ahira,' he called, but he received no