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

will not eat the tongue under any circumstances because they
are afraid it will make them bark like a dog.) He made a pack
out of his sleeping furs. From the sled he chose only those
items vital for survival: the oilstone, snowsaw, his bag of
carving flints, and bear spear. He strapped on his skis. Into
the east he journeyed, abandoning his sled without another
thought. In the Unreal City, on the island of the shadow-men,
he could
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always gather whalebone and cut wood to make another sled.
In his later years he was to remember only poorly those next
few days of skiing across the ice. Memory is the most
mysterious of phenomena. For a boy to remember vividly, he must
experience the world with the deepest engagement of his senses,
and this Danlo could not do because he was weak of limb and
blurry of eye and clouded and numb in his mind.
Every morning he slid one ski ahead of the other, crunching
through the frozen slush in endless alternation; every night he
built a hut and slept alone. He followed the shining mountain
eastward until it grew from a tooth to a huge, snow-encrusted
horn rising out of the sea. Waaskel, he remembered, was what
the shadow-men called it. As he drew closer he could see that
Waaskel was joined by two brother peaks whose names Soli had
neglected to tell him – this half ring of mountains dwarfed the
island. He couldn't make out much of the island itself because
a bank of grey clouds lay over the forests and the mountains'
lower slopes. It was at the end of his journey's ninetieth day
that the clouds began clearing and he first caught sight of the
City. He had just finished building his nightly hut (it was a
pity, he thought, to have to build a hut with the island so
close, no more than half a day's skiing away) when he saw a
light in the distance. The twilight was freezing fast, and the
stars were coming out, and something was wrong with the stars.
At times, during flickering instants when the clouds billowed
and shifted, there were stars below the dark outline of the
mountains. He looked more closely. To his left stood the
ghost-grey horn of Waaskel; to his right, across a silver,
frozen tongue of water that appeared to be a sound or bay,
there was something strange. Then the wind came up and blew the
last clouds away. There, on a narrow peninsula of land jutting
out into the ocean, the Unreal City was revealed. In truth, it
was not unreal at all. There were a million lights and a
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thousand towering needles of stone, and the lights were
burning inside the stone needles, burning like yellow lights
inside an oilstone, yet radiating outward so that each needle
caught the light of every other and the whole City shimmered
with light.
'O blessed God!' Danlo muttered to the wind. It was the most
beautiful thing he had ever seen, this City of Light so