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

'Jiro, Jiro,' he said, calling his last dog over to him. With
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only the two of them left, the little snowhut seemed too big.
Jiro waddled closer, his belly bulging and distended. He
rested his head on Danlo's leg and let him scratch his ears.
'My friend, we have had forty-six days of sledding and
twenty-two days of storm. When will we find the Unreal City?'
The dog began licking his bleeding paws, licking and
whining. Danlo coughed and bent over the oilstone to ladle out
some hot dog grease melting in the pot. It was hard for him to
move his arms because he was very tired, very weak. He rubbed
his chest with the grease. He hated to touch his chest, hated
the feel of his rib bones and wasted muscles, but everyone
knew that hot grease was good for coughing fits. It was also
good for frostbite, so he rubbed more grease over his face,
over those burning patches where the dead, white skin had
sloughed off. That was another thing about starvation: the
body burnt too little food to keep the tissues from freezing.
'Perhaps the Unreal City was just a dream of Soli's; perhaps
the Unreal City does not exist.'
The next day, he helped Jiro pull the sled. Even though it
was lighter, with only twelve food packets stowed among the ice
saw, sleeping furs, hide scraper, oilstone, it was still too
heavy. He puffed and sweated and strained for a few miles
before deciding to throw away the hide scraper, the spare
carving wood and ivory, and the fishing lines. He would have no
time for fishing now, and if he reached the Unreal City, he
could make new fishing gear and the other tools he might need
to live. He pulled the lightened sled with all his strength,
and Jiro pulled too, pulled with his pink tongue lolling out
and his chest hard against the leather harness, but they were
not strong enough to move it very far or very fast. One boy-man
and a starved dog cannot match the work of an entire sled team.
The gruelling labour all day in the cold was killing them. Jiro
whined in frustration, and Danlo felt like crying. But he
couldn't
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cry because the tears would freeze, and men (and women)
weren't allowed to cry over hardships. No, crying was
unseemly, he thought, unless of course one of the tribe had
died and gone over – then a man could cry an ocean of tears;
then a true man was required to cry.
Soon, he thought, he too would be dead. The coming of his
death was as certain as the next storm; it bothered him only
that there would be no one left to cry for him, to bury him or
to pray for his spirit. (Though Jiro might whine and howl for a
while before eating the meat from his emaciated bones. Although
it is not the Alaloi way to allow animals to desecrate their
corpses, after all that had happened, Danlo did not begrudge
the dog a little taste of human meat.)