"Phillip Jose Farmer - Dark is the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

gleamed red, white, green, blue, and purple, so heavily impregnated with quartz that it was hard as rock.
From the branches dangled the fruit, the soul eggs, each as big as Deyv's fist. Around the tree was a
circle of dry, pale dirt a hundred feet in diameter, and outside the circle marched four bowmen. Up in the
tower, near the base of the tree, were four watchers, each ready to beat on a drum if an enemy human or
a predator beast was sighted.

Behind Deyv came the rest of the tribeтАФmen, women, children, dogs, and cats. All the people were
shouting the ritual encouragement, except for the appointed insulter.

"Yaaa, Deyv of the Red Egg! See how he has to be driven forth into the jungle! Does he go bravely like
our heroic foreparents or like his own great-souled father? Naaah! He goes trembling, legs shaking, his
bowels ready to loose themselves with fear, and that red egg .. . ! Ha! That red egg! It betrays the color
of his soul! It's green, green with fear! Rabbit! Mouse! March like a man, like a warrior of the Turtles.
Don't slink like a coyote!"

Gurni, the insulter, was having fun. He was also getting revenge for what Deyv had once cried at him
when he had gone out to get a mate.

Deyv looked down at the soul egg hanging from a leather cord around his neck. His face felt warm, and
he could see his body, except where the breechclout covered it, turning red. It was true. The translucent
stone, a pale scarlet when he was in a good mood, had become streaked with green. The green pulsed
swiftly as if it were connected with his hammering heart. Which, in a sense, it was.

How humiliating! How embarrassing!

"Don't pay any attention to that big-mouthed'blow-wind!" his mother shouted almost in his ear. "No man
or woman has ever gone out on a mate-hunt without showing some green. Except the hero Keelrow, and
that was five generations ago, and maybe if s all a lie about him, anyway!"

The shaman, Agorw, danced up alongside Deyv. He wore a bonnet of tall feathers; the cheeks of his face
and buttocks were marked with three vertical stripes, red, white, and blue; his breechclout was painted
with the crooked cross; his knees were bound in leather, from which dangled seven coils of human hair;
one hand was inserted inside a skull of a giant turtle and the other shook a staff from which hung three
empty turtle shells. His own soul egg was a deep blue shot with pulsating aquamarine streaks.

"Shame on you, woman!" he cried. "The ghost of Keelrow will come to you in your dreams and put

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 DARK IS THE SUN

horns on your husband's head. And the child will drink you dry!"

"See these!" Deyv's mother yelled. "Do you think any baby, even if he were as big and fat as you, could
empty these?"

The tribe howled with merriment, and the shaman, his face red, stomped off out of Deyv's sight.

For a moment, Deyv forgot his fear and embarrassment. He chuckled. His mother was afraid of nothing.
He wished he were. But she was like him in that she had a quick temper and sometimes had to pay for it
The shaman would get back at her somehow. However, she would not regret her words. She was willing