"Shirley Meier & S. M. Stirling - Fifth Millenium 02 - Saber and Shadow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Meier Shirley)

Awkwardly, clutching the knife in her teeth, she swam with a slow, even stroke
to the mangroves and hauled herself out of the water and the ooze, climbing up
the main trunk. There, in a springy tangle of branches that were well above
the wave action, she fell asleep.

Next morning she grinned at the distant speck that must be the coaster, driven
further out by the estuary current while they tried to affect repairs.

"Good morning!" she said, as if the captain could hear her. Then she licked
dry lips. First course was to find water. Then food. She slapped at the
mosquitoes. And some kind of clothing against the bugs.

As the sun rose higher, she found a pool of cleanish water further in the
swamp and drank through a handful of grass to strain it as best she could. Her
claws were blunting but they wore through the oak around her ankles so she
could pull her feet free and felt much better even though the thick,
rot-stinking mud clung to her all over. Without the wood, her ankles were
braceletted by black leeches where the skin was broken.

"Koru, I think the Dark Lord thought this place up as an antechamber to
Halya," she muttered, looking at the fringe of leeches around one ankle slowly
ballooning from tassels to lumps.

Later that afternoon, she avoided a pack of miniature alligators, watching
them swarm a strayed cow, picking the beast down to bones in the time it took
to count one hundred. The gators were barely the length of her hand, nothing
like the man-sized creatures that hunted the warm rivers south of the Mitvald
Sea, or the ten-meter oceangoing kind.. .. But a stray cow meant that humans
lived somewhere near.

Climbing through the limber trunks of the tangled mangroves to avoid the
gators' pond, she bunked to chase way the greenish-grey blotches swimming
across her sight.

"Got to eat soon," she muttered, then clamped her lips shut against making any
more noise than she had to. I need something more orderly than all these
stupid trees, something like pavement. Maybe a good building or two to block
out this miserable wilderness. The almost dry ground under her feet was enough
of a shock to make her stumble, and the sounds she heard ringing through the
trees cheered her no end; the rasp of saws, the squeal of a hand mill, dogs
barking, geese, voices. The sound of a village carried for a couple of
chiliois sometimes.

But they're probably the sort like that captain, she thought. Besides, I've no
money to buy with. She found a relatively dry hollow to wait for the sun to go
down, too hungry to feel hunger, only emptiness, trying to ignore Her awful
hair, matted with sweat, salt at the roots, grease, and crushed insects. She
leaned her head back against the tree, looking up through the grey-green
leaves festooned with strange grey moss that looked like hair. First, after
all the essentials, I have to find a city big enough to have a fair-sized