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

are used to grease their bodies against the cold. Even the
dung of the bask finds its uses on the treeless prairies, being
dried and used for fuel. The bask is said to be the Mother of
the Wagon Peoples, and they reverence it as such. The man
who kills one foolishly is strangled in thongs or suffocated in
the hide of the animal he slew; if, for any reason, the man
should kill a bask cow with unborn young he is staked out,
alive, in the path of the herd, and the march of the Wagon
Peoples takes its way over him.
Now there seemed to be fewer men and animals rushing
past, scattered over the prairie; only the wind remained; and
the fires in the distance, and the swelling, nearing roll of dust
that drifted into the stained sky. Then I began to feel,
through the soles of my sandals, the trembling of the earth.
The hair on the back of my neck seemed to leap up and I
felt the hair on my forearms stiffen. The earth itself was
shaking from the hoofs of the bask herds of the Wagon
Peoples.
They were approaching.
Their outriders would soon be in sight.
I hung my helmet over my left shoulder with the sheathed
short sword; on my left arm I bore my shield; in my right
hand I carried the Gorean war spear.
I began to walk toward the dust in the distance, across the
trembling ground.

#2
I Make the Acquaintance of the Wagon People

As I walked I asked myself why I did so-why I, Tarl
Cabot-once of Earth, later a warrior of the Gorean city of
Ko-ro-ba, the Towers of the Morning, had come here.
In the long years that had passed since first I had come to
the Counter-liarth I had seen many things, and had know
loves, and had found adventures and perils and wonders, but
I asked myself if anything I had done was as unreasoning, as
foolish as this, as strange.
Some years before, perhaps between two and five years
before, as the culmination of an intrigue enduring centuries,
two men, humans from the walled cities of Gor, had, for the
sake of Priest-Kings, undertaken a long, secret journey, car-
rying an object to the Wagon Peoples, an object bestowed
on them by Priest-Kings, to be given to that people that was,
to the Goreans' knowledge, the most free, among the fiercest,
among the most isolated on the planet-an object that would
be given to them for safekeeping.
The two men who had carried this object, keeping well its
secret as demanded by Priest-Kings, had braved many perils
and had been as brothers. But later, shortly after the com-
pletion of their journey, in a war between their cities, each