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

him. The only warning he had was an odd buzzing in the bones of his head. Then
the air shimmered through a whole dazzling array of colors and Skeeter plunged
through with a wild yell, face flushed, hair standing on end, T-shirt glued to
his back with sweat and his sneakers skidding on nothing.
He landed on stony ground, with a sky big as an ocean howling all around
him. A man dressed in furs, face greased against a bitter wind, stared down at
him. The man's expression wavered somewhere between shock, terror, and
triumph, all three shining at once in his dark eyes. Skeeter, winded by the
chase and badly dazed by the plunge through nothingness, just stood there
panting up at him for endless moments, eye locked to eye. When the man drew a
sword, Skeeter knew he had two choices: run or fight. He was used to running.
Skeeter usually found it easier to run than to confront an enemy directly,
particularly when running allowed him to lay neat traps in his wake.
But he was out of breath, suddenly and shockingly frozen by the bitter
wind, and confronted with something a few thieving raids at the mall had not
prepared him to deal with: a man ready to actually kill him.
So he attacked first.
One eight-year-old boy with a stolen Swiss Army knife was no match for
Yesukai the Valiant, but he did some slight damage before the grown man put
him on the ground, sword at his throat.
"Aw, hell, go on and kill me, then," Skeeter snarled. "Couldn't be worse'n
being ignored."
To his very great shock, Yesukai-Skeeter learned later just exactly who and
what he was-snatched him up by his shirt, slapped his face, and threw him
across the front of a high-pommelled Yakka saddle, then galloped down a
precipitous mountainside that left Skeeter convince they were all going to
die: Skeeter, the horse, and the madman holding the reins. Instead, they
joined a group of mounted men waiting below.
"The gods have sent a bogda," Yesukai said (as Skeeter later learned, once
he could understand Yesukai's language. He had heard the story recounted many
times over the cook fires of Yesukai's yurt.) He thumped Skeeter's back with a
heavy hand, knocking the breath from him. "He attacked brave as any Yakka
Mongol warrior, drawing the blood of courage." The man who'd slung him over
his saddle bared an arm where Skeeter had cut him slightly. "It is a sign from
the spirits of the upper air, who have sent us the beginnings of a man to
follow us on earth."
A few younger warriors smiled at the ancient Mongol religious tenet;
grizzled old veterans merely watched
Skeeter through slatted eyes, faces so perfectly still they might have been
carved of wood.
Then Yesukai the Valiant jerked his horse's fretting head around to the
north. "We ride, as I have commanded."
Without another word of explanation, Skeeter found himself bundled onto
another man's saddle, thrust into a fur jacket too big for him, a felt hat
with ear flaps tied under his chin-also too big for him-and carried across the
wildest, most desolate plain he had ever seen. The ride went on for hours. He
fell asleep in pain, woke in pain to be offered raw meat softened by being
stored between the saddle and the horse's sweating skin (he managed to choke
it down, half-starved as he was), then continued for hours more until a group
of black-felt tents he later learned to call yurts rose from the horizon like