"Linda Evans - Time Scout 2 - Wages of Sin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Linda)

themselves to hold special classes in uptime languages, while those most able
to understand the world in which they were trapped did their best to explain
it to those least able.
Uptimers knew about it, but most didn't pay much attention to the
"underground society's" activities. On TT-86, management cared enough to
provide an official psychologist on the payroll, whose sole duty was to help
them adjust, but "Buddy" didn't really understand what it meant-emotionally,
in the depth of one's belly-to be torn away from one's home time and become
trapped in a place like the bustling time terminal that La-La Land had become
over the years.
So downtimers turned to their own unofficial leaders in times of need or
crisis. One of those unofficial leaders was Ianira Cassondra. Sitting waiting
for Marcus to return to home to her, she spent a quiet moment bemused with the
thought that her own history was, in many ways, more unlikely than the odd
world in which she now led others through an unlikely existence. Ianira, born
in Ephesus, the holy city of the Great Artemis Herself, had learned the
secrets of rituals no man would ever understand from priestesses who followed
the old, old ways. Ianira, secluded from the world as only a priestess of
Artemis could be, was then, at sixteen, ripped from that world and sold into
virtual slavery through the marriage bed-tearing her away from beloved Ephesus
to the high citadel of Athens, across the Aegean Sea. Ianira, abandoned by her
kinsmen, was left in the shadow of the dusty Agora where Athenian men met
under blazing clear light to stroll amidst vendors of figs, olive oil, and
straw baskets while they discussed and invented political systems that would
change the world for the next twenty-six hundred years. Secluded from all that
she knew, Ianira had tried to learn the mysteries of the patron goddess of her
new home, only to be kept a virtual prisoner in her new husband's gyneceum.
Ianira the "Enchantress," who had once danced beneath the moon in Artemis'
sacred glade, bow in hand, hair loose and wild, had prayed to her mother's
ancient Goddesses to deliver her-and, finally, They had heard. One night,
Ianira had fled the gyneceum and its imprisoning "respectability," driven by
grief and terror into the night-dark streets of Athens.
Half bent on seeking asylum in Athene's great temple at the crowning height
of the city-and half intent on throwing herself from the Acropolis rather than
endure another night in her husband's home-Ianira had run on bare feet, lungs
sobbing for air, her body weak and shaking still from the birthing chair in
which she had so recently been confined.
And there, in those silent, dusty streets where men changed history and
women were held in bondage, her prayers to Athene, to Hera, to Demeter and her
daughter Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld, to Artemis and Aphrodite and
even to Circe the Enchantress of Old, were finally answered. Pursued by an
enraged husband, she ran as fast as she could force her flagging body, knowing
all too well what fate awaited her if her husband caught her. Ianira's bare
toes raised puffs of dust in the empty, moonlit Agora, where the columns of
the gleaming white Hephestion rose on a hillock to one side and the painted
Stoa where philosophers met to discourse with their disciples rose ghostlike
before her in the haunted night.
Still bent on trying to reach the shining Parthenon above her, Ianira
darted into an alleyway leading up toward the Acropolis and heard a beggar man
seated on the ground call out sharply, "Hey! Don't go through there!"