"Douglas Hill - Last Legionary 0 - Young Legionary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hill Douglas)

prongs, some nearly a metre long.

The mammoths moved in small herds, and ruled the foothills as the wyverns ruled the high peaks.
Mammoths ate everything and anything, and had only one response to any creature foolish enough to
enter their range of vision. They charged it, killed it, and ate it.

And this herd, about twenty of them, had seen Keill.

Grunting menacingly, heads down, they advanced towards him. Fear sent adrenalin surging into Keill's
blood as he edged slowly to his right, wondering if the sloping side of the gully might slow them enough
for him to find some refuge on the farther side. But his movement was all the invitation the mammoths
needed.

The grunts rose into a strangled roar. Bunched together in a solid mass of monstrous power, the
mammoths charged.

Keill fled before them like a ghost. But despite their weight, their six-legged gallop was terrifyingly fast.
As he sprinted up the slope, he knew they were gaining on him. And he had not even reached the crest
when he realized despairingly that they were only a stride behind him.
Legion instinct made him stop and whirl, to meet death face to face. And the same instinct, or a deeply
ingrained combat reflex, propelled him into a standing leap, straight up, as the lead mammoth hooked its
vicious tusks up towards his belly.

He leaped, the mammoth lurched forward as its tusks found no target, and Keill came down - his feet
slapping firmly on to the enormous heaving breadth of the mammoth's back. For a frozen instant he
teetered there as the creature surged ahead. But balance, too, was reflexive in a legionary. As were
crazy, suicidal risks - when the only alternative was certain death.

Without thinking, Keill sprang forward. One foot struck the boulder-like back of the mammoth just
behind the leader. Instantly he found his balance, and leaped again. And so, while the herd's thunderous
gallop slowed slightly as it neared the crest of the slope, Keill vaulted lightly from one immense humped
back to another, across the entire herd.

It was like crossing a river on stepping stones - except that the stones themselves were moving at speed
in the opposite direction, and were heaving and jolting and shifting underfoot. One small misjudgment and
Keill would have been bloody pulp on the ground. But even in the choking dust thrown up by the
charging beasts, Keill's eye and reactions were automatic, thought-quick and accurate as a computer. His
conscious mind had only begun to catch up with what he was doing when he soared off the back of the
last mammoth, fell and rolled in a flurry of dust, and sat up astonished to watch the herd disappear over
the crest of the slope. In their blind charge, the armour-hided creatures had not even noticed his leap or
his weight on their backs. Their charge would probably lead them blundering on for some distance, until
at last they would slow, snuffle around grumpily awhile, then wander off. Keill stood up, trembling slightly
from the exertion and delayed tension. A thought struck him. Was this, a herd of mammoths, what
Commander Maron had meant, when she had spoken of 'the most deadly danger any legionary can
face'? If so, he had faced it and survived it. He grinned with relief and delight at what he had done. And
the grin became an outright laugh, half-choked by the swirling dust, when he realized that he was still
unthinkingly clutching his loincloth, with its precious cargo of food, in the white-knuckled grip of his right
hand.

4. The Valley