"Ardath Mayhar - Khi to Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mayhar Ardath)

were hurrying up with armfuls of grass and vine that they had obviously
scrounged from friends and relatives. Before slow-witted human beings
could have made up their minds that there really was a problem, the
Varlian had knitted onto their home a spacious chamber for me.
Midsummer though it was, a chill was creeping through the wood on
the heels of the waning sunlight. I was glad to know that I wouldnтАЩt have to
spend another night crouched in a tree on a bare limb. I slipped through
my oversized door into the new room, then through the enlarged door into
the main house. Aside from piles of mosses for beds, there was no
furniture to speak of. There were, however, stacks of bowls cut and
polished from the tough husks of the nuts, in a sort of pouch let into one
wall. As I moved back into my own room, Mrs. Lime entered her domain
and caught up a batch of the bowls, together with spoonlike utensils. She
hurried out onto the branch that was her doorstep, arranged the bowls in
line, and squatted to wait.
After a bit, a large Varlian came chattering and chuckling through the
treetops. He carried a skin bag that sloshed to his motions and a basket
that bulged with something lumpy.
 Spying our waiting crew, he hurried over, tilted his bag, and poured
into the bowls a neat stream of broth. Then from his bag he counted out
enough brown pods for two each. There was a cheerful crackle of Varlian
as I patted him on the shoulder. Then he was off to fill the supper dishes of
the next family in line.
The broth was good. There was no meat in it (I could see that these
people had good reason for being vegetarians), but a mixture of vegetables
and nuts made it thick and tasty. The pods gave me a bit of trouble until
Lime seized one in his paws, gave it a sharp twist, and cracked it open.
Whereupon I saw that it was filled with a creamy-white тАЬinsideтАЭ that
tasted much like bread. All in all, it was a filling meal, made delicious by
the fact that I had had nothing to eat for over two days.
When we were done, the youngsters were sent, protesting, to clean the
bowls in a sand-pit at the foot of the tree. Lime and his wife and I reclined
on the branch. I could see that my friend was waiting for something. The
sun was well down, the sky filled with painfully bright stars. There was no
moon here, according to my computerтАЩs sketchy information. I was just as
well pleased, for I had known the Ginli to use a moonlit night for their own
purposes. Still, the starlight was bright enough for desultory sign
language, as we waited.
A whisper of motion in the branches announced the arrival of
someoneтАФseveral someones, as it turned out. In the dim light I could see
five Varlian step onto our branch, nod to Lime and Mrs. Lime, and
arrange themselves in a convenient semicircle around us.
There ensued a rather complicated dialogue, the gist of which seemed
to be that I (the gesture for me, while funny, was friendly. They indicated
one of the big brown pods, sketching it effortlessly on the air, and adding
to its upper end two arcs that could only be my somewhat prominent
earsтАж and I had to agree that the shade of the pods almost exactly
matched that of my skin) was to accompany Lime and another, smaller,
Varlian westward. To meet someone. Again I encountered the curvaceous
shape that Lime had sketched before.