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

Now he looked more closely he could see movement on the beach. Small dots,
moving around. People, perhaps, like this girl. Some of them were small.
Children, running free. Many children.

The woman turned, and started climbing away from them, down the slope toward her
world, carrying whatever she had gathered from these high banks. She was shaking
a fist at them now. She even bent to pick up a sharp stone and threw it toward
Frazil; it fell short, clattering harmlessly.

"I don't understand," Frazil said.

Night-Dawn thought of the loathing he had seen in the strange woman's eyes. He
saw himself through her eyes: squat, fat, waddling, as if deformed.

He felt shame. "We are not welcome here," he said.

"We must bring the others here," Frazil was saying.

"And what then? Beg to be allowed to stay, to enter the warmth? No. We will go
home."

"Home? To a place where people live a handful of winters, and must scrape food
from ice with their teeth? How can that compare to this?"

He took her hands. "But this is not for us. We are monsters to these people. As
they are to us. And we cannot live here."

She stared into the pit of light and green. "But in time, our children might
learn to live there, Just as we learned to live on the ice."

The longing in her voice was painful. He thought of the generations who had
lived out their short, bleak lives on the ice. He thought of his mother, who had
sought to protect him to the end; poor One-Tusk, who had died without seeing the
people of the mountains; dear, loyal Frazil, who had walked to the edge of the
world at his side.

"Listen to me. Let these people have their hole in the ground. We have a world.
We can live anywhere. We must go back and tell our people so."

She sniffed. "Dear Night-Dawn. Always dreaming. But first we must eat, for
winter is coming."

"Yes. First we eat."

They inspected the rock that surrounded them. There was green here, he saw now,
thin traces of it that clung to the surface of the rock. In some places it grew
away from the rock face, brave little balls of it no bigger than his fist, and
here and there fine fur-like sproutings.

They bent, reaching together for the green shoots.