"John Norman - Gor 06 - Raiders of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

Raiders or Gor
John Norman
Chronicles of Counter-Earth Volume 6
1 The Blood Mark
farther shore.
I could smell the sea, gleaming Thassa, in the myths said to be without a
I reached down from the rush craft and took a palm of water into my
hand and touched my tongue to it. Thassa could not be far beyond.
I took the triangular-bladed tem-wood paddle and moved the small craft,
light and narrow, large enough scarcely for one man, ahead. I was formed of
pliant, tubular, lengthy Vosk rushes, bound with march vine.
To my right, some two or three feet under the water, I saw the sudden,
rolling yellowish flash of the slatted belly of a water tharlarion, turning as
it made
its swift strike, probably a Vosk carp or marsh turtle. Immediately following
I saw
the water seem to glitter for a moment, a rain of yellowish streaks beneath
the
surface, in the wake of water tharlarion, doubtless its swarm of scavengers,
tiny
water tharlarion, about six inches long, little more than teeth and tail.
A brightly plumaged bird sprang from the rushes to my left, screaming
and beating its sudden way into the blue sky. In a moment it had darted again
downward to be lost in the rushes, the waving spore stalks, the seed pods of
various growths of the Gorean tidal marshes. Only one creature in the marshes
dares to outline itself against the sky, the predatory UI, the winged
tharlarion.
It was difficult to see more than a few feet ahead: sometimes I could see
no further than the lifted prow of my small craft, as it nosed its way among
the
ruses and the frequent rence plants.
It was the fourth day of the sixth passage hand, shortly before the
Autumnal Equinox, which in the common Gorean calendar begins the moth of
SeтАЩKara. In the calendar of Ko-ro-ba, which, like most Gorean cities, marks
years
by its Administration of my father, Matthew Cabot. In the calendar of Ar, for
those it might interest, it was the first year of the restoration of Marlenus,
Ubar
of Ubars, but, more usefully for the purposes of consolidating the normal
chaos
of Gorean chronology, it was the year 10,119 Contasta Ar, that is, from the
founding of Ar.
My weapons shared the boat, with a gourd of water and a tin of bread
and dried bosk meat. I had the Gorean short sword in its scabbard, my shield
and helmet, and, wrapped in leather, a Gorean long bow of supple Ka-la-na
wood, from the yellow wine trees of Gor, tipped with notched bosk horn at each
end, loose strung with help and whipped with silk, and a roll of sheaf and
flight
arrows. The bow is not commonly favored by Gorean warriors, but all must
respect it. It is the height of a tall; its back, away from the bowman, is