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

'Unreal City,' he repeated over and over as he stared off
into the blinding eastern snowfields, 'unreal, unreal.'
But it was not the World-soul's intention that Jiro eat him.
Day by day the sledding became harder, and then impossible. It
was very late in the season. The sun, during the day, burned
too hotly. The snow turned to fareesh, round, granular
particles of snow melted and refrozen each day and night. In
many places, the sea ice was topped with thick layers of malku.
On the eighty-fifth day of their journey, after a brutal
morning of pulling through this frozen slush, Jiro fell dead in
his harness. Danlo untied him, lifted him into his lap and gave
him a last drink of water by letting some snowmelt spill out of
his lips into the dog's open mouth. He cried, then, allowing
himself a time of tears because a dog's spirit is really very
much the same as a man's.
'Jiro, Jiro,' he said, 'farewell.'
He placed his hand over his eyes and blinked to clear them.
Just then he chanced to look up from the snow into the east. It
was hard to see, with the sun so brilliant and blinding off the
ice. But through the tears and the hazy glare, in the distance,
stood a mountain. Its outline was faint and wavered like water.
Perhaps it wasn't a mountain
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after all, he worried; perhaps it was only the
mithral-landia, a traveller's snow-delirious hallucination. He
blinked and stared, and he blinked again. No, it was certainly
a mountain, a jagged white tooth of ice biting the sky. He
knew it must be the island of the shadow-men, for there was no
other land in that direction. At last, perhaps some five or
six days' journey eastward, the Unreal City.
He looked down at the dog lying still in the snow. He stroked
his sharp grey ears all the while breathing slowly: everything
seemed to smell of sunlight and wet, rank dog fur.
'Why did you have to die so soon?' he asked. He knew he
would have to eat the dog now, but he didn't want to eat him.
Jiro was his friend; how could he eat a friend?
He pressed his fist against his belly, which was now nothing
more than a shrunken bag of acid and pain. Just then the wind
came up, and he thought he heard Ahira calling to him from the
island, calling him to the terrible necessity of life. 'Danlo,
Danlo,' he heard his other-self say, 'if you go over now, you
will never know halla.'
And so, after due care and contemplation, he took out his
knife and did what he had to. The dog was only bones and fur
and a little bit of stringy muscle. He ate the dog, ate most of
him that day, and the rest over the next several days. The
liver he did not eat, nor the nose nor paws. Dog liver was
poisonous, and as for the other parts, everyone knew that
eating them was bad luck. Everything else, even the tongue, he
devoured. (Many Alaloi, mostly those of the far western tribes,