"Chalker, Jack L - Rings 1 - Lords Of The Middle Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

LORDS OF THE MIDDLE DARKLORDS OF THE MIDDLE DARK
Copyright й 1986 by Jack L. Chalker
e-book ver. 1.0
To all those who still believe that without imagination we are nothing,
and without bold adventures and risks nothing great of permanence is attainable.



1. A BOWL FULL OF GODS


MOST PEOPLE BELIEVED THAT THEY WOULD EVENTUALLY go to heaven, even the ones whom
everybody else knew would never make it. Very few, however, believed they could
get there without dying.
The mountain had always fascinated him, but he had never really understood the
awe and fear it inspired in almost everyone else. The Mountain of the Gods, the
Cheyenne called it, and to be sure it was peculiar.
Enormous, it had a conical, volcanic shape although it was not, nor had it ever
been, a volcano. It rose up in the center of lesser, ordinary mountains,
straight into the sky itself. None had ever seen its peak and lived to tell
about it, for even on the clearest of days a dense ring of clouds shrouded its
top from view. The clouds moved around the peak, usually clockwise, and
sometimes seemed to swirl and boil as they did so, but the great cloud ring
never dissipated, never thinned, and never revealed what was beyond the
five-and-a-half-kilometer mark.
Certainly there was good reason for the people of the region to both fear and
worship the mountain. It looked different, it behaved differently, and it had
been there for as long as any of the People could remember. Why he felt more
fascination than fear, and had felt that way even as a child, he couldn't say,
although he had always been somewhat different from others.
He was a Human Being -- what the subhumans of other nations called a Cheyenne -- and
he was a hunter, a warrior, and an adult of some rank. He shared his people's
mystic sense of being one with nature, of the tangible and spiritual
interrelationships between human and nature, and accepted most of what he had
been taught. He did not, however, believe that gods lived inside mountains.
Both his chief and his medicine man knew of his obsession with the mountain, but
they were unable to sway him. They argued that none who had ever dared to climb
the sacred mountain had returned and that the spirits guarding its slopes were
of the most powerful sort. He believed in spirits and in sacred ground, but he
could not believe that the mountain was a part of this. The mythology alone was
too new, by the way his people measured time, and quite unconvincing. He also
knew that there were things of Heaven and things of Nature and things of men,
and the mountain had always seemed to him to be the last of these, the legends
and stories deliberately spread to prevent any questioning of the mountain's
existence. It was on the People's land, but it was not a part of the People, nor
had it been there in ancient times, as had the other mountains.
What the others saw as supernatural, he saw as insult and, perhaps, as
sacrilege.
"We hunt the buffalo and deer, and we manage the land well for the Creator," the
medicine man noted. "It is a good life we have here, a precious thing. The