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

reply. No direct reply, that is, no screeching or hooing or
beating of wings. In silence, Ahira answered him. The Alaloi
have five words for silence, and nona, the silence that
portends danger, is as meaningful as a bellyful of words. In
nona, Danlo turned his face to the wind and listened to things
no civilized man could hear. That day he did not travel.
Instead, he cut snow blocks for a hut larger and sturdier than
his usual nightly shelter. Into the hut he moved the food
packets from the sled. He brought the dogs into the hut as
well, bedding them down in the long tunnel that led to his
living chamber. He made sure that there was snow to melt into
drinking water and
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enough blubber to burn in the oilstone. And then he waited.
The storm began as a breath of wind out of the north. High
wispy clouds called otetha whitened the sky. The wind blew for
a long time, intensifying gradually into a hiss. It was the
Serpent's Breath, the sarsara that every traveller fears. Danlo
listened to the wind inside his hut, listened as it sought out
the chinks between the snowblocks and whistled through to
strike at his soft, warm flesh. It was a cold wind, dead cold,
so-named because it had killed many of his people. It drove
glittering particles of spindrift into his hut. Soon, a layer
of cold white powder covered his sleeping furs. The curled-up
dogs were tougher than he, and didn't really mind sleeping
beneath a shroud of snow. But Danlo was shivering cold, and so
he worked very hard to find and patch each chink with handfuls
of malku, slush ice melted from the heat of his hand. After the
malku had frozen in place – and this took only a moment – he
could breathe more easily and settle back to 'wait with a
vengeance', as the Alaloi say.
He waited ten days. It began snowing that evening. It was
too cold to snow very much, but what little snow that the sky
shed, the wind found and blew into drifts. 'Snow is the frozen
tears of Nashira, the sky,' he told Jiro. He had called the dog
closer to the oilstone and was playing tug-of-war with him. He
pulled at one end of a braided leather rope while Jiro had the
other end clamped between his teeth, growling and shaking his
head back and forth. It was childish to pamper the dog with
such play, but he excused himself from the usual travelling
discipline with the thought that it was bad for a man – or a
half-man – to be alone. Today, the sky is sad because the
Devaki have all gone over. And tomorrow too, I think, sad, and
the next day as well. Jiro, Jiro, why is everything in the
world so sad?'
The dog dropped the rope, whined, and poked his wet nose into
his face. He licked the salt off of his cheeks. Danlo
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laughed and scratched behind Jiro's ears. Dogs, he thought,
were almost never sad. They were happy just to gobble down a