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

as carefully as scribes or physicians, in the arts of detaining
life.
Some of these men have achieved fortune and fame in
various Gorean cities, for their services to Initiates and
Ubars, and others with an interest in the arts of detection
and persuasion. For some reason they have all worn hoods. It
is said they remove the hood only when the sentence is
death, so that it is only condemned men who have seen
whatever it is that lies beneath the hood.
I was surprised at the distance I had been from the herds,
for though I had seen the rolling dust clearly, and had felt
and did feel the shaking of the earth, betraying the passage
of those monstrous herds, I had not yet come to them.
But now I could hear, carried on the wind blowing toward
distant Turia, the bellowing of the basks. The dust was now
heavy like nightfall in the air. The grass and the earth
seemed to quake beneath my tread.
I passed fields that were burning, and burning huts of
peasants, the smoking shells of Sa-Tarna granaries, the shat-
tered, slatted coops for vulos, the broken walls of keeps for
the small, long-haired domestic verr, less belligerent and
sizeable than the wild verr of the Voltai Ranges.
Then for the first time, against the horizon, a jagged line,
humped and rolling like thundering waters, seemed to rise
alive from the prairie, vast, extensive, a huge arc, churning
and pounding from one corner of the sky to the other, the
herds of the Wagon Peoples, encircling, raising dust into the
sky like fire, like hoofed glaciers of fur and horn moving in
shaggy floods across the grass, toward me.
And then I saw the first of the outriders, moving toward
me, swiftly yet not seeming to hurry. I saw the slender line of
his light lance against the sky, strapped across his back.
I could see he carried a small, round, leather shield, glossy,
black, lacquered; he wore a conical, fur-rimmed iron helmet,
a net of colored chains depending from the helmet protecting
his face, leaving only holes for the eyes. He wore a quilted
jacket and under this a leather jerkin; the jacket was trimmed
with fur and had a fur collar; his boots were made of hide
and also trimmed with fur; he had a wide, five-buckled belt. I
could not see his face because of the net of chain that hung
before it. I also noted, about his throat, now lowered, there
was a soft leather wind scarf which might, when the helmet
veil was lifted be drawn over the mouth and nose, against
the wind and dust of his ride.
He was very erect in the saddle. His lance remained on his
back, but he carried in his right hand the small, powerful
horn bow of the Wagon Peoples and attached to his saddle
was a lacquered, narrow, rectangular quiver containing as
many as forty arrows. On the saddle there also hung, on one
side, a coiled rope of braided boskbide and, on the other, a