"Brackett, Leigh - Skaith 3 - Reavers Of Skaith (V1.1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brackett Leigh)

N'Chaka snarled, and fought the straps.
The golden face asked a question.
N'Chaka heard. He did not wish to answer, but he had no choice. The poison running in him forced him to answer.
He spoke, in the clicks and grunts of a language so primitive that it was only a little more complex than the speech of apes.
Penkawr-Che, the golden man, said, "He reverts to that every time. Interesting. Bring Ashton."
Ashton was brought.
The question was repeated, and the answer.
"You're his foster-father. Do you know what language he is speaking?"
"The aboriginals of Sol One speak that tongue. He was reared by them after his own parents were killed. Until he came into my careЧat fourteen, or thereaboutsЧthat was the only speech he knew."
"Can you translate?"
"I was one of the administrators of Sol One. Part of my duty was to protect the abos from the miners. I wasn't always successful. But I knew them well." He translated meticulously, and smiled. "There are no words in that vocabulary for the things you want to know about."
"Ah," said Penkawr-Che. "Well, then. Let me think."
2
The million little bells of Ged Darod chimed softly from the roofs and spires of the Lower City, where the warm wind rocked them. It was a cheerful sound, speaking of love and kindness. But in the packed streetsЧamong the temples to Old Sun, to Skaith-Mother and Sea-Mother, and to my lord Darkness and his lady Cold and their daughter Hunger, the deadly trinity who already possessed almost half the planetЧthe people were silent and dismayed.
The temples held many suppliants, asking the gods to protect their own; but the larger portion of the crowd looked elsewhere. Farers in the thousands filled the parks and the pleasure gardens; made up of all the races of the Fertile Belt, dressed, painted, and adorned in every conceivable manner, these free, careless, and perpetually itinerant children of the Lords ProtectorЧwho saw, through their servants, the Wandsmen, that the hungry were always fed and the needy succoredЧturned their faces to the Upper City. The Wandsmen had never failed them. Surely they would somehow manage to turn aside the alien menace that still threatened them from out the sky, even after the burning of the starport.
One ship had gone from Skaith carrying traitors who wished to overturn the rule of the Wandsmen and replace it with that of a foreign power. If this should be accomplished, the Farers knew that they, and the way of life that sustained them, would be swept away.
They milled in the vast square below the Wandsmen's Gate and waited in the hope of salvation.
High in the Upper City, which housed the heart and center of the Wandsmen's power, the Lord Protector Ferdias stood at a window in the Palace of the Twelve, looking down at the splendor of flashing domes and glittering peacock tiles. Ferdias was an old man, but age had not bowed his unyielding back nor dimmed the harsh fire of his eye. He wore the white robes of his rank, and not the slightest shadow of humility betrayed the fact that Ferdias had come back to Ged Darod as a fugitive.
Yet he was keenly aware of that fact. Very keenly. Especially upon this day.
A massive door opened somewhere behind him. Voices sounded, subdued and distant in the cavernous room. Ferdias remained as he was. There was no longer any urgency.
He had begun his life of service as a gray apprentice within these mighty walls. He had not known then that Old Sun, the ginger star that ruled his heaven, had been recorded as a number on the galactic charts of a civilization he had never heard of. He had not known that he dwelt, along with his sun and his planet, in a remote sector of something these people had named the Orion Spur. He had not known that the galaxy, out beyond his lonely little sky, contained a vast and busy complex of worlds and men known as the Galactic Union.
How happy he had been without that knowledge! How happy he would have remained had it never been vouchsafed him. But knowledge had dropped unbidden, in flame and thunder, out of the clouds, and innocence was forever lost.
In a little more than a dozen years, the starships had brought many benefits to the sad old world of Ferdias' birth, starved for the metals and minerals it no longer possessed. So the foreign men had been allowed to come and go, carefully watched and supervised, from the single starport at Skeg. But the ships had brought less welcome things: heresies, treasons, rebellions, warЧand, at the end, a mad stranger out of the stars, who had set the all-powerful Lords Protector fleeing down the roads of Skaith away from their burning rooftree, homeless as any Farers.
Ferdias set his hands on the massive stone of the windowsill and felt the solidity of it. He smiled. He saw the light of Old Sun shining upon the streets below, upon the mass of humanity that waited there, and his heart opened with a physical pang, sending a flooding warmth throughout his body so that he caught his breath and his sight became blurred with tears. These were his people, to whose welfare he had devoted his lifeЧthe poor, the weak, the homeless, the hungry. His children, his beloved children.
Because of my error, he said to them in the silence of his mind, you were almost destroyed. But the gods of Skaith have not forsaken you. And, he added humbly, Nor me.
In the room behind him, someone coughed. It was neither a hastening nor an impatient cough.
Ferdias sighed and turned.
"My lord Gorrel," he said, "get you back to your bed. You have no business here."
"No," said Gorrel, and shook his gaunt old head. "I shall remain."
He sat in a large chair that was a cocoon of wrappings and cushions; he had not yet recovered from the journey south. Ferdias thought that Gorrel was not likely to recover, and that it was less the hardships of travel than the shattering shock of what had happened at the Citadel that had broken Gorrel's health.
"Well, then," he said gently, "perhaps you may find fresh strength in what I have to tell you."
Besides Gorrel, in the room now stood five other old men in the same white robes that Ferdias wore, making up the seven Lords Protector. Behind them were the Twelve, the council of senior Wandsmen in tunics of somber red, with gold-tipped wands of office in their hands. Standing a little apart from the Twelve was another red-clad Wandsman, on whose proud and bitter face Ferdias' gaze rested for a long moment.
"This has been a cruel time," Ferdias began, "a time of tribulation, when it seemed as if the very fabric of our society was being rent. Tregad joined the revolt against us, and we suffered a crushing defeat at Irnan. We were betrayed, here at Ged Darod, by one of our own, the Wandsman Pedrallon, who caused a starship to land in defiance of our decree and take on passengersЧmen and women, including Pedrallon himself, who wished to deliver Holy Mother Skaith to the Galactic Union as a member planet, thus putting an end to our rule. It has been a time when we could foresee the destruction of twenty centuries of work and devotion in the service of mankind, a service which has endured since the Wandering."
He paused, aware of their intent faces all turned toward him. He smiled again, with a kind of ferocious benevolence.
"I have called you together here," he said, "to tell you that that time has ended."
Out of the sudden shocked confusion of voices, one rose strong and clear, the voice of an orator. It was Jal Bartha, who would not be chosen from among the Twelve to take old Gorrel's place among the Lords Protector when it fell vacant, though Ferdias knew that he hoped to be. Jal Bartha's lack of judgment might have been borne, but his conceit never.
"How can that be, my lord?" Jal Bartha demanded. "These traitors you speak of are well on their way to Pax, the man Stark moves among the city-states preaching the gospel of starflight, our Wandsmen are driven out or slainЧ"
"If your silver tongue can be stilled for a moment," said Ferdias quietly, "I shall make all things clear."
Jal Bartha flushed, and inclined his head stiffly.
Ferdias glanced once again at the thirteenth Wandsman, and clapped his hands.
A small door opened at the side of the great chamber.
Two men in green tunics entered, with a third between them. He wore blue, marking his lesser rank, and he was young and utterly distressed.
"This man's name is Llandric," said Ferdias. "One of Pedrallon's creatures, a small serpent in our midst He has something to say to you." Llandric stammered.
Ferdias commanded, on a note of chilled steel, "Say it, Llandric, as you said it to me."
"Yes," he began, "IЧI serve Pedrallon." He seemed to find his courage, facing their hostility with a sort of quiet defiance. "I believe that the peoples of Skaith must be free to emigrate, if only for one reasonЧthat the planet's livable areas grow smaller each year and room must be made."
'We do not require a lecture on Pedrallon's heresies," said Jal Bartha. "We understand them well enough." "I don't think you understand them at all," said Llandric, "but that's beside the point. After Pedrallon went away, we have continued to monitor the transceiver which he secured from the Antarean, Penkawr-Che, and which was Pedrallon's secret means of communication with the off-worlders. Because of that monitoring, I am able to tell you what has happened, and that is why I am here. I myself have heard the talking of the starships."
The thirteenth Wandsman stepped forward. "What starships? I drove them all from Skeg, with the flames of the burning behind them. What starships?"
"There are three," said Llandric. "One is the ship of Penkawr-Che, the off-worlder who agreed with Pedrallon and the man Stark to take our delegations to Galactic Center, at Pax. Penkawr-Che has betrayed us. He has not gone to Pax. He has returned to Skaith with the two other ships in company, and all his passengers."
Ferdias quelled the outburst that followed. "My lords, please! Let him continue."
"I first knew of this," Llandric said, "when word was brought to me that three ships had met in orbit above Skaith. I went at once to the hidden place where the transceiver is kept and listened, myself. Penkawr-Che had transferred three of his passengersЧPedrallon into one ship, Lady Sanghalain of Iubar and the person Morn into the other. This latter ship was to land at Iubar in the far south and demand payment for the Lady. The other ship was to go to Andapell, Pedrallon's country, where he is a prince and would bring a high ransom. Penkawr-Che himself was to land at Tregad and sell them back their elders, and then at Irnan for the same purpose. That has been done."