"Cherryh,.C.J.-.Morgaine.4.-.1988.-.Exiles.Gate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cherryh C J)

of the dog is in them. It is in their eyes, in that way they creep forward, like
hounds at hearth seeking some tidbit, with a kind of cunning and bravado neither
breed alone would have. They retreat from such missiles as bone-chips and even
handfuls of dust, they slink from shouts and threats, but in the long hours of
the night they come closer, and rest, tongues lolling, one of them rising now
and again to pace the line and to try the temper of this offering, whether any
of them has yet weakened or determined to surrender.
By the second evening patience is rewarded. And at full stretch of the chain, in
the night, the wolves and the survivors can reach truce, of sorts, while the
terrible sounds proceed, of quarrels and the tearing of flesh and the crack of
bone.
For the remaining nights, the wolves have leisure.

*

The horses stride into the world, the dapple gray and the white, in an opal
shimmering, stride for stride. Their hooves touch the leafy mold of a forested
hillside and their legs stretch, take their weightЧlike the riders, they are
bemazed by the gulf, and chilled by the bitter winds.
The riders let them run. They have no knowledge where they are . . . but they
have taken such strides before.

*

The sun came mottled through a grove of twisted shapes, saplings, trees,
blighted as by some perpetual wind . . . such places as this, they had seen
before, and they had passed gates before the one which hove up on the hill above
them, still powerful, still baneful and flinging power into the heavy air.
The horses ran out their terror, slowed as the trees grew thicker, and walked a
gentler course in a forest where, among the trees, stood stones half again
taller than horse and rider together. They snorted their acquaintance with a
foreign wind and the smell of this world, while the riders went in silence.
But in time they stopped of their own accord, and the riders only listened to
the world, the whispering of wind and branch, and looked about them at this
strangely twisted place.
"I do not like this," Vanye said, and gave a twitch of his shoulders as he
leaned forward against his saddle.
Horses dapple-gray and white, male and female, like the riders: Morgaine in
black and silver, Vanye in forester's gray and green, her hair qhal-silver and
his hair human-hued, pale brown beneath a peaked steel helm, wrapped round the
rim with a white scarf . . . that was the look of them. They were lost, except
for the road which led themЧwhich they trusted they would find again: for qhal
whenever they had built, had built much of the same pattern; and to leave the
Gate and its confusion was the only thing that mattered, across such a gulf as
that void at their backs, that cold nightmare which lay between them and a
yesterdayЧHeaven knew how long lost.
They went armored and armed. Morgaine was liege and Vanye was liegeman; she
wasЧwhat she was, and he was Man; that was the way of things between them.
"Nor do I care for it," said Morgaine, and started the gray stud moving, a
gentle, careful pace.