"Zach Hughes - Killbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

but a bare-assed learner, running free through the camp, permitted to
snatch food from any fire, treated with the sometimes amused but always
fond tolerance of all. I mourned for my father, but even then, having been
on my first hunt, I had my hardax, and with my father dead, I was the
man. I told my mother not to weep, for she had her man. And then the
curse came and darkened my skull and nothing that Seer of Things
Unseen could do would cause it to go away, and was it grief for my father
or shame for me which caused my mother to weaken, to spend her days
lying in the hide-house sighing, weeping, and then burning with the fever?

I had never had anyone, since then. Life, of course, is God's most
precious gift, so even an accursed one was sacred, but there were the
taunts from my contemporaries, the laughter behind my back. When it
became evident that I was to be different in other ways the shame of it
pushed me into myself. I set up my hidehouse, legacy of my father, on the
far fringe of the family area, went my solitary way, and in my desperation
and unhappiness took chances, bracing the fierce bear, nearly dying in his
clutch as his great heart pumped out his life just in time to keep his
carnal-smelling maw from closing over my head.

Soon, however, they did not taunt me. Although striking a fellow man is
punishable, certain games, tests of strength, are encouraged; and soon I
was able to handle my peers with an ease which caused mutterings. It was
no test at all to pin Logan, or Young Pallas, or even the hulking Yorerie to
the ground in a wrestling match. In games of skill and endurance I
excelled, running faster than the swiftest, able to trot for endless hours to
bring a deer to bay and then, his giant carcass dragging to the ground, to
carry the animal back to camp to turn him over to the family of Yorerie
the Butcher for preparation and sharing. My longbow was two hands
longer than even the longbow of the family head, Strongarm, and only the
respect which I owed to our family head prevented me, in hand games,
from besting the Strongarm himself.

But I was and had always been alone. There was only one bright spot in
my life, and that was in the form of a sunny-faced prewoman, Yuree, who,
perhaps in pity at first, came to me and talked to me. She was so
beautiful, her body short and round and soft, her skull gleaming and oiled,
her wide eyes alert as the eyes of a frightened female deer. Even as a child
she knew her powers, sending me to the top of the tallest fruit tree to toss
down the ripest fruits with no more authority than her smile.

"Eban," I remembered her saying, as I lay behind the rock and let my
eyes cover the ground in front of me, counting the bleached piles of bones
which, it seemed, grew more numerous further down the slope, "what will
you do when I come of age?"

"I don't know," I mumbled, not daring to think that I, the freak, the
accursed one, could presume to ask for her.

"Oh, you pain me," she said. "Will you not ask for me?"