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

'One final thing.' No softening could be heard in her firm voice. 'In the course of your journey you may
encounter one special danger. Not only is it the gravest danger you will have ever faced - it is the most
deadly danger that any legionary can face. Are you prepared?'

Keill struggled to keep his voice calm. 'I am prepared, Commander.'

Maron nodded, and stepped back from the edge of the cliff. 'Then the Ordeal begins. Return safely,
Keill.'

That, too, was part of the ritual, and a standard leave-taking among Keill's people. He turned to face her.
'Return safely, Commander.'

Without another word Maron strode away towards the flyer. It closed around her with a soft hiss, and
the thrusters flared. Smoothly the little machine lifted from the rock, angling steeply upwards. In moments
it was lost to sight behind the looming crags.

Silence and darkness, so complete as to seem almost solid, fell over the plateau where the boy stood -
small, nearly naked, totally alone.



For a long moment Keill remained as he was, staring up at the peaks where the flyer had vanished from
sight. He seemed unaware of the biting wind, or the chill of the bare rocks that glinted in the starlight like
dark metal, as if they were clad in armour.

These were the Iron Mountains, which marched for hundreds of kilometres, range upon range. They
dominated nearly a third of the small continent that was the main habitable area, for humans, on the planet
Moros.

The Iron Mountains were the bleakest, harshest natural feature in all of that bleak, harsh world. Yet life of
sorts could be found, even there - life that was perfectly adapted for survival in that grim environment.

The Ordeal that Keill faced was designed to test the same thing - how capable he was of survival. He
would have to survive the elements, and a journey that would have been gruelling even if he had been
fully clothed and equipped. He would have to find food and water, and to follow the correct route
through the rocky mazes. And he might have to face any of the mountains' various life forms, most of
which were as savagely hostile as the terrain itself.

Commander Maron had said that the Ordeal was a symbol of the years ahead of him. But she might also
have said that it symbolized the life of Keill's ancestors - those people who had first landed on Moros,
and claimed it, during the long-ago centuries when humanity had spread out across the galaxy, in that
mighty outward emigration called the Scattering.

History said that those people had chosen to settle on Moros because it was bleak and harsh - and so
was unlikely to attract other colonists. The original settlers of the planet were a tightly knit, disciplined
group with very firm ideas about how life should be lived, how society should be ordered. They wanted
to be left in peace to put those ideas into practice.

In the event, it had not worked out quite that way.