"John Norman - Gor 04 - Nomads of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

Even the autumn grass itself bent and shook in brown tides
toward Turia, shimmering in the sun like a tawny surf
beneath the fleeing clouds above; it was as though the unseen
wind itself, frantic volumes and motions of simple air, too
desired its sanctuary behind the high walls of the far city.
Overhead a wild Gorean kite, shrilling, beat its lonely way
from this place, seemingly no different from a thousand other
places on these broad grasslands of the south.
I looked into the distance, from which these fleeing multi-
tudes, frightened men and stampeding animals, had come.
There, some pasangs distant, I saw columns of smoke rising
in the cold air, where fields were burning. Yet the prairie
itself was not afire, only the fields of peasants, the fields of
men who had cultivated the soil; the prairie grass, such that
it might graze the ponderous bask, had been spared.
Too in the distance I saw dust, rising like black, raging
dawn, raised by the hoofs of innumerable animals, not those
that fled, but undoubtedly by the bask herds of the Wagon
Peoples.
The Wagon Peoples grow no food, nor do they have
manufacturing as we know it. They are herders and it is said,
killers. They eat nothing that has touched the dirt. They live
on the meat and milk of the bosk. They are among the
proudest of the peoples of Gor, regarding the dwellers of the
cities of Gor as vermin in holes, cowards who must fly behind
walls, wretches who fear to live beneath the broad sky, who
dare not dispute with them the open, windswept plains of
their world.
The bosk, without which the Wagon Peoples could not
live, is an oxlike creature. It is a huge, shambling animal,
with a thick, humped neck and long, shaggy hair. It has a
wide head and tiny red eyes, a temper to match that of a
sleen, and two long, wicked horns that reach out from its
head and suddenly curve forward to terminate in fearful
points. Some of these horns, on the larger animals, measured
from tip to tip, exceed the length of two spears.
Not only does the flesh of the bask and the milk of its
cows furnish the Wagon Peoples with food and drink, but
its hides cover the domelike wagons in which they dwell; its
tanned and sewn skins cover their bodies; the leather of its
hump is used for their shields; its sinews forms their thread;
its bones and horns are split and tooled into implements of a
hundred sorts, from awls, punches and spoons to drinking
flagons and weapon tips; its hoofs are used for glues; its oils



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