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

There was no retreat for them. That, they neither one mentioned. Vanye cast a
quick look back, where the thin, spiral-twisted trees hid all view of that great
span which was a qhalur GateЧlittle different than other gates they had seen,
very like one he had known, in a land like this oneЧbut this was not that land:
he knew that well enough, knew it in the patterns of the rare leaves which grew
in dispirited clumps at the end of limbs, lit by a wan and (he thought, and time
proved) westering sun.
Although the gate behind them stood still powerful, and disturbed the air and
worked at the nerves, it could not carry them back, and it could not carry them
where they had now to go, or tell them their direction. For now, it was only
downslope, from standing stone to standing stone, in a woods as unwholesome as
the feeling in the air.
Life hereЧstruggled. What had feet to flee, fled; what rooted, grew twisted and
strange, from the trees to the brush, the shoots of which were tormented and
knotted, the leaves of which were deformed and often curled upon themselves. And
the horses laid back their ears and shook themselves from time to time,
likeliest with that same feeling that made the fine hair stand up on the body
and made the ears think that there was sound where no sound existed, until they
had put more and more of the hill between them and the gate.
They rode in amid a jumble of stones and trees, finally, a leaning conspiracy of
broken stone walls and twisted saplings none of which attained great age, but
many of which lay rotten or broken by winds.
Vanye looked about him as his white mare danced and fretted beneath him, hooves
ringing on half-buried paving in quick, nervous steps, echoing out of time to
the pace of the iron-shod dapple gray. "This was a keep of some sort," he
murmured, and crossed himself anxiously, forgetting as he forgot in such
moments, that his soul was damned.
"A great one," Morgaine answered him, whether that was surmise or sure
knowledge; and Vanye blinked and stared round him a second time as the horses
moved and the ruin of walls unfolded. "We have found our road again."
Hooves on stone. Buried pavings. Vanye conceived of the Road as a thing of all
places, all gates, all skies: it was one Road, and the gates inevitably led to
it.
"No sign of men," he murmured.
"Perhaps there are none," Morgaine answered him. "Or perhaps there are."
He took nothing for granted. He gazed about him with a warrior's practiced eye,
looking for recognizable points, things by which he could make order out of this
jumbled buff and white stone. These flat stretches, these narrower places were
the foundations of houses, craftshops, warehouses. PeopleЧuncountable numbers of
people would have dwelt in such a place, and plied their crafts; but how much
land must they till, how feed so great a number in so rough a land, except they
take their provender from war and tribute? It did not suggest peace.
He tried to imagine these ruins near him as they might have stood, bare
foundations rising into forms which (he could not help it) very greatly
resembled the keep and the barracks and the guesting-house of Ra-morij of his
birth, in distant Andur-Kursh, a courtyard cobbled and usually having a standing
puddle down the middle of it, where the scullery dumped its dirty water. It was
gray cobbles in his vision, not the buff stone under the mare's hoovesЧwas an
aching touch of home, however cruel it had been in his living there.
He remembered other crossings of that gulf they had just passed, the night he