"Barbara Hambly - Darwath 5 - Icefalcons Quest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

lands where I was born. I will be returning to those lands now, but it will be my death should I encounter
my own people again."
He embraced her briefly and then began his slow ascent of the icebound rocks, long pale braids snaking
in the wind, to regain the way that would lead down Sarda Pass to the world he had forsaken forever.
? Chapter 4

Eleven years previously, the Icefalcon had departed from the Talking Stars People, under circumstances
which, if they did not absolutely preclude his return, guaranteed a comprehensively unpleasant welcome
home.
Because it was unreasonable to suppose that any of those who dwelt in the Real World-the Twisted Hills
People, or the Earthsnake People, or those other peoples whom the mud-diggers referred to collectively
as the White Raiders-would trust one whose Ancestors had been enemies of their Ancestors, there had
really been no place for him to go but across the mountain wall in the east.
As a child he had heard tales of the people of the straight roads, the mud-diggers, the dwellers in the river
valleys, though the ranges of the Talking Stars People lay far north of the ragged line of mud digger mines
and settlements that stretched from Black Rock among the Bones of God to Dele on the Western
Ocean.
Noon and Watches Water had told him the mud-diggers were crazy-which he had found later to be by
and large true-and also lazy and stupid about important things, and almost unbelievably unobservant
about the world around them.
In the warm lands where water was easy to come by and plants were coaxed in abundance from the
earth, there were kings and walls and warriors to protect those who didn't bother to learn to protect
themselves. People could afford to be lazy and to make an art of telling fanciful stories about things that
had never actually happened, at least for as long as the kings were alive and the walls were standing.
After the coming of the Dark Ones things changed, of course. But in the high summer of his seventeenth
year, when the Icefalcon made his way east over the pass that now he traveled west, the Dark Ones had
been only one tale among many to the mud-diggers and in places not even that.
In that summer the cover had been better, pale aspens bright among the firs, with brakes of hazel,
dogwood, and laurel to conceal him and his horse. He'd moved mostly by twilight since the people of the
straight roads kept guards in the pass at that time, fearing quite rightly the depredations of bandit troops
from the West. In those days the Raiders had very little use for the mud-diggers' cattle. There had been
gazelle and bison, red deer and wild sheep then in the northern plains.
The Keep of Dare was the first structure the Icefalcon beheld on the sunrise side of the mountain wall. It
had surprised him, he recalled, and smiled a little at the recollection. The houses of the mud diggers that
he had seen before had all been wood structures of two or at most three floors, or in the South, low
buildings of adobe roofed with pine poles or tiles. He had not expected the Keep. It was some time
before he learned that civilized people on this side of the mountains did not all dwell in great dark solitary
fortresses, untouchable by enemies.
Sunrise found him in the thin stands of birch and aspen at the western foot of Sarda Pass. Reaching the
place nearly an hour short of first light, he found a spot where chokecherry grew thick around the white
boulders that marked the ascending road from the West and, crawling in, rolled himself up in Rudy's
mantle and his own blanket to sleep. The snow lay behind him. Clouds piled the gray-and-white western
cliffs of Anthir, and bitter wind nipped at him like a Wise One's leftover curse. He hoped Gil would be
well.
Squirrel chitter woke him. He had a sling tied around the bottom of his quiver, and it took him nearly two
hours to kill four squirrels: spring wary, and spring thin as well, no more than a few mouthfuls each. Still
he roasted them and ate everything that wouldn't keep: guts, hearts, brains. He'd need the meat later.
Some of the innards he used as fish bait in the pools of one of the many springs that came down from
Anthir's climbing maze of hogbacks and scarps, and the fish he caught he cooked also.
Time-consuming, but he knew himself incapable of rescuing Tir alone if there were a Wise One in the