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

sheer chance.
But chance had brought him what he now felt some guilt about, a chance perhaps
more remote than picking his readout at random. No, it was still too much to
believe. The old man was right. If suspicions were enough, they'd have picked
him up before he left, or at least when he arrived.
The medicine man, sensing the younger one's disturbance, gently changed the
subject. "You have not married. A man your age should have children by now."
The comment only partially broke his mood. "There are few women of the nation in
the Councils and none who are the type who could stand being married to one such
as myself."
"There are many attractive young women with the tribe."
"That may be true. We have always been blessed that way. But how could I take
one of them? Wrench her from this life to the Councils? It would be taking a
beautiful sturgeon and placing her in the midst of the high prairie. The same as
I would be, after a while, returning here to live. My heart is always with my
people, but my mind is a world away."
"Perhaps it is too far," the old medicine man responded. "We will be leaving
soon, and only a small number of us will remain when the first snows come. Even
when you are with your people, you stay apart. You come as we leave, and you
spend little time with the Four Families chosen to remain. You build mountains
between yourself and your manhood, between yourself and your people. I will send
someone over to help you prepare here and to take some of the routine burdens."
"No, I -- "
"Yes," the medicine man responded with the finality of power. He had the power
and the training. The tribal chief was more of a military officer; the medicine
man was the politician. He had made the decision to send Hawks out to be
educated and trained and had nominated him for Council. He was very low in the
hierarchy of human civilization, but he was still above Hawks.
They spent a little more time in pleasantries and gossip, sharing information
and talking about old friends, and at last the old man yawned and bade his
farewell. Hawks watched him vanish quickly into the darkness and the winds, and
thought.
He did love it here, even when the tribe migrated slowly southward, leaving only
the Four Families to represent symbolically the tribe and its territorial
rights. They did not own the land; none of the People had any real belief that
land could be owned at all. But they were a small tribe in a small nation,
surrounded by larger and more powerful nations, and their way of life depended
on maintaining territorial rights.
Perhaps the old man had made a mistake, he thought, feeling both the communion
with the land and his isolation within it. It would not be the first one,
certainly. My heart and my blood are here, in the land and the winds.
There had been a woman once -- an unobtainable woman. She had been beautiful and
brilliant, a crack anthropologist specializing in the plains tribal systems that
had bred them both. When he was young, he had been obsessed with her, for she
had been everything he had ever dreamed of in a woman, a wife, a partner. She
had mistaken his love, though, for friendship and flattery, and he'd been too
shy to force anything lest he alienate and lose her if she rejected him -- which,
of course, she had, indirectly, by marrying a sociologist from the Jimma tribe
of the nation. She had been so happy, she'd wanted him to be the first to know.
There had been nothing then but work, and he had thrown himself into it with a