"Baxter, Stephen - Huddle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

the ice shapes with pink, red and orange.

There was a cacophony of noise: groans and cracks, as the ice moved around them.
But there were no human voices, save their own: only the empty noise of the ice
-- and the occasional murmur, Night-Dawn thought, of whatever giant beasts
inhabited this huge sea.

They walked for days. The mountain chain they had left behind dwindled, dipping
into the mist of the horizon, and the chain ahead of them approached with
stultifying slowness. He imagined looking down on himself, a small, determined
speck walking steadily across this great, molded landscape, working toward the
mysteries of the center.

Food was easy to find. The slushy ice was soft and easy to break through.

No-Sun would walk only slowly now. And she would not eat. Her memory of the
monster that had snapped up One-Tusk was too strong. Night-Dawn even braved the
water to bring her fish, but they were strange: ghostly-white creatures with
flattened heads, sharp teeth. No-Sun pushed them away, saying she preferred to
consume her own good fat. And so she grew steadily more wasted.

Until there came a day when, waking, she would not move at all. She stood at the
center of a fat, stable ice-floe, a pillar of loose flesh, rolls of fur
cascading down a frame leached of fat.

Night-Dawn stood before her, punched her lightly, cajoled her.

"Leave me here," she said. "It's my time anyhow."

"No. It isn't right."

She laughed, and fluid rattled on her lungs. "Right. Wrong. You're a dreamer.
You always were. It's my fault, probably."

She subsided, as if deflating, and fell back onto the ice.

He knelt and cradled her head in his lap. He stayed there all night, the cold of
the ice seeping through the flesh of his knees.

In the morning, stiff with the cold, they took her to the edge of the ice floe
and tipped her into the water, for the benefit of the creatures of this giant
sea.

After more days of walking, the ice grew thin, the water beneath shallow.

Another day of this and they came to a slope of hard black rock, that pushed its
way out of the ice and rose up before them.

The black rock was hard-edged and cold under Night-Dawn's feet, its rise
unrelenting. As far as he could see to left and right, the ridge was solid,