"David Drake - Belisarius 2 - In The Heart Of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

He resumed his steps.
Soon, yes, Ranapur will fall. And the cobra will sate itself again. As it has
so many times.
He drew near his master's tent. For a moment, he stopped, studying that simple
structure.
Not much to look at, truly. But, then, the mongoose never takes pride in its
appearance. It simply studies the cobra, and ponders the angles.
Holkar began pulling back the tent flap. Another rolling cannonade caused him
to pause, look back. For a moment, his scholar's face twisted into the visage
of a gargoyle, so driven was he by hatred for all things Malwa.
But there were no Malwa spies close enough to see that face. Such spies had
learned quickly that the endless squabbles over women between the foreigners
and their Kushan escorts seemed to erupt in sudden brawls which, oddly,
injured no one but bystanders watching the scene. In the first days after the
foreigners set up their camp, two Malwa spies had been accidentally mauled in
such melees. Thereafter, the spies had kept a discreet distance, and reported
as little as possible to their overseers, lest they be ordered to resume a
close watch.
The slave pulled back the flap and entered the tent. He saw his master
squatting on a pallet, staring into nothingness, mouthing words too soft to
hear.
Hatred vanished. Replaced, first, by devotion to his master's person. Then, by
devotion to his master's purpose. And then, by devotion itself. For the slave
had closed the demon world of Malwa behind him and had entered the presence of
divinity.
He knelt in prayer. Silent prayer, for he did not wish to disturb his master's
purpose. But fervent prayer, for all that.
Across the ancient, gigantic land of India, others also prayed that night.
Millions of them.
Two hundred thousand prayed in Ranapur. They prayed, first, for deliverance
from the Malwa. And then, knowing deliverance would not come, prayed they
would not lose their souls as well as their bodies to the asura.
As Holkar prayed, his family prayed with him, though he knew it not. His wife,
far away in a nobleman's mansion in the Malwa capital of Kausambi, hunched on
her own pallet in a corner of the great kitchen where she spent her days in
endless drudgery, prayed for her husband's safety. His son, squeezed among
dozens of other slave laborers on the packed-earth floor of a shack in distant
Bihar, prayed he would have the strength to make it through another day in the
fields. His two daughters, clutching each other on a crib in a slave brothel
in Pataliputra, prayed that their pimps would allow them to remain together
another day.
Of those millions who prayed that night, many, much like Holkar, prayed for
the tenth avatara who was promised. Prayed for Kalkin to come and save them
from the Malwa demon.
Their prayers, like those of Holkar, were fervent.
But Holkar's prayers, unlike those of others, were not simply fervent. They
were also joyous. For he, almost alone in India, knew that his prayers had
been answered. Knew that he shared his own tent with the tenth avatara. And
knew that, not more than five feet away, Kalkin himself was pouring his great
soul into the vessel of the world's deliverance. Into the strange, crooked,