"Daniel Keys Moran - Armageddon Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

Ralesh's words stayed with her, though, like a curse that would not be shaken.

"You cannot run so far nor so fastтАж I will catch you."

Jalian's hands clenched into fists. Summer would come.

DATELINE 712 A.B.C.


They gave Jalian few duties on the day the Hunters came back; she finished them early, and slipped out
of the Clan House when nobody was watching her. She wandered through the village aimlessly, stopping
to play a game of strike with one of the boys. (She was only beginning to understand that boys were not
fit company; she had not yet learned why that was so, except that in all the stories it was the boys who
caused the Big Crunch and the Fire Times.)

By the time the watch was preparing to change, she had reached the clearing that separated Selvren
village from the forest. She squirmed into what cover she could find at the south end of the clearing;
brown-haired and brownclothed, she would have been hard to see in any case. Against the brown
summer meadow grass she was next to invisible.

The clearing was a ten-second run for Jalian, from one end to the other, and it was in clear view of the
Clan House. Out in front of the Clan House the men were tending the fires that would be used to smoke
the catch the Hunters returned with.

Ten seconds.

The watch's replacements arrived. The women stood together, gossiping for a few moments before the
new guards assumed their posts.

Jalian drew her legs up under her, checked her knife to make sure the sheath was securely tied down,
peered toward the Clan House one last timeтАж

She ran.

Ten seconds was a long time; long enough to think of exactly what Ralesh would do to her if she was
seen, if she was caught. Run, and run, and runтАж Jalian reached the trees at the north end of the clearing,
running as fast as she had ever run before. Her foot caught in a tuft of the long brown grass at the last
instant and sent her tumbling. She did her best to convert it into a roll as she had been taught, but still the
wind was knocked from her lungs and she had trouble breathing when she regained her feet. Fighting to
pull air into her emptied lungs, Jalian squirmed up to the edge of the decent cover and peered out. There
was no unusual activity over at the long wooden Clan House, nothing out of the ordinary for early
morning in the late thaw-timeтАж she had not been seen.
 Jalian grinned fiercely. It would be late afternoon now before she was missed, and by then she would be
long gone. They would know where she had gone, when she failed to show up to help with the
preparation of the Cermeal, but by then, with luck, it would be too late. If the Hunters started out after
her the instant they became aware of her absence, Jalian would still have a third-day start.

With luck, before nightfall Jalian would be in the land of the gods and demons that was at the end of the
Big Road. She did not think that anyone but Ralesh would try to follow her thereтАФand perhaps not even