"Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 03 - Shrine of Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

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Paul J. McAuley




Shrine of Stars


Chapter One
THE PYRE
THE TWO [GARBLED]-HATCHED men were working in a small clearing in the trees that
grew along the edge of the shallow reach of water. The larger of the two was chopping steadily at
the base of a young blue pine. He wore only ragged trousers belted with a length of frayed rope
and was quite hairless, with flabby, pinkish-gray skin and an ugly, vacant face as round as a
cheese. The head of his axe had been blackened by fire; its handle was a length of stout pine
branch shucked of its bark and held in the socket of the axe head with a ring of carefully whittled
wedges. His companion was unhandily trimming branches from a pine bole, using an ivory-
handled poniard. He was slender and sleek-headed, like a shipwrecked dandy in scuffed and
muddy boots, black trousers and a ragged white shirt with an embroidered collar. A ceramic coin
hung from his long supple neck by a doubled leather thong, and a circlet woven from coypu hair
and studded with tiny black seed pearls was loose on his upper arm. Now and again he would
stop his work and stare anxiously at the blue sky beyond the tree-clad shore.
 The two men had already built a raft, which lay near the edge of the water. It was no more
than a pentad of blue pine logs lashed together by a few pegged crosspieces and strips of marsh
antelope hide, and topped by bundles of reeds. Now they were constructing a pyre, which stood
half-completed in the center of the clearing. Each layer of cut and trimmed pine and sweetgum
logs was set crosswise to the layer below, and dry reeds and caches of resinous pine cones were
stuffed in every chink. The body of a third man lay nearby. It was covered with fresh pine
boughs, and had attracted the attention of a great number of black and bronze flies. A fire of
small branches and wood chips burned beyond, sending up white, aromatic smoke; strings of
meat cut in long strips dangled in the smoke, curling as they dried.
All around was devastation. Swamp cedars, sweetgurn trees and blue pines all leaned in the
same direction. A few of the biggest trees had fallen and their upturned roots had pulled up
wedges of the clayey soil. Nothing remained of the blue pines which had cloaked the ridge above
but ash and smoldering stumps. Some way beyond the clearing where the two men worked was a
wide, shallow basin of vitrified mud filled with ash-covered steaming water.
Except for the ringing of the axe, the land was silent, as if still shocked by the violence
recently done there. On one side, beyond the island's central ridge and a marshy creek, were the
low black cliffs of the old river shore and a narrow plain of dry scrub that ran along the edge of
the world; in the other, beyond the reach of shallow, still water, a marsh of yellow reeds stretched
toward the edge of the Great River. It was noon, and very hot.
The slender man cut the last branch from the pine bole and straightened and looked up at the
sky again. "I don't see the need to trim logs which are only for burning," he said. "Do you love
work so much, Tibor, that you must always make more?"
"The pyre must go together neatly, little master," Tibor said, fitting his words to the