"John Morressy - A Law for the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morressy John)

Some believed this new, reasonable view. A very few clung to the legends of their
forefathers. The majority gave little thought to the question. Thus it came as a great surprise to
the people of the coastal settlements to hear that visitors from the stars had been living among
the forest dwellers for two years.

Ryne was a small child then, but he remembered those times clearly.




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CHAPTER ONE

The news arrived on a market day. Ryne's parents had laid out their goods in the customary
place, by the black altarstone atop the seawall. The bargaining dish was polished brightly. The
counting stones stood in neat pyramids, the gray by his father's left hand, the red by his
mother's right. All was in order, all in readiness for a busy market. But no trading was done
that day.

Ryne never learned who had brought the news. He only knew that suddenly everyone in
the marketplace was talking, shouting, arguing. The crowd was large, and all were excited.

Many of those who heard of the visitors that day refused to believe a word of the story. The
marketplace was full of merchants and traders, a sceptical lot, and they were quick to scoff.
They knew how word travelled, and how much it changed as it passed from speaker to
speaker, ever more remote from the event. Besides, who could know what happened in the
forest? It lay beyond the plains, across the barren stretch of black rock known as Deadlands.
Few went out there, and fewer came back. This "news" was all a lie, they said.

And truly, the tale was incredible. Men with green skin, black skin, mottled skin? Men
with dead white skin and flame-red hair and eyes? Preposterous! the listeners said. Creatures
twice as tall as the tallest among us, and others not reaching to our knees, covered with fur?
Ridiculous!

They laughed at their neighbors' gullibility. Humanoids with seven fingers, or none, or
tentacles where fingers ought to be? Absurd! they said, and strode off secure in their certainty
that any other intelligent beings who lived in this universe were sure to have hairless bodies, be
five-fingered, and of a proper size. In short, they would resemble the sensible inhabitants of
coastal Jadjeel, or at most, the barbarians of the forests and hills, and not some dream creatures.

But there were those who accepted the news as true, and they were much affronted. Why
had such a boon befallen the savages of the forest? Why, they demanded irritably of one
another, why could not these marvelous beings have come to us instead? We have valuable
goods to trade, while the forest dwellers have only their herbs and their primitive weapons of
nala wood. It was really most unfortunate, they said. And with great excitement, they
proceeded to speak of an expedition across Deadlands and into the dangerous depths of the
nala forest.