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

could use the long bow with, so to speak, no tincture of shame, no confusion
of
conscience, without the least injury to my self-esteem; I knew the long bow to
be a magnificent weapon; accordingly, I made it my own.
I heard a bird some forth or fifty yards to my right; it sounded like a
marsh gant, a small, horned, web-footed aquatic fowl, brad-billed and
broadwinged.
Marsh girls, the daughters of rence growers, sometimes hunt them with
throwing sticks.
In some cities, Port Kar, for example, the long bow is almost unknown.
Similarly it is not widely known even in Glorious Ar, the largest city of
known
Gor. It is reasonably well know in Thentis, in the Mountains of Thentis, famed
for
her tarn flocks, and in Ko-ro-ba, my city, the Towers of Morning. Cities vary.
But
generally the bow is little known. Small straight bows, of course, not the
powerful long bow, are, on the other hand, reasonably common on Gor, and
these are often used for hunting light game, such as the brush-maned,
threetoed
Qualae, the yellow-pelted, sing-horned Tabuk, and runaway slaves.
I heard another bird, another marsh gant it seemed, some fifty yards
away, but this time to my left. I was late in the afternoon, the fourteenth
Gorean Ahn I would have
guessed. Some swarms of insects hung in the sedge here and there but I had
not been much bothered: it was late in the year, and most of the Gorean
insects
likely to make life miserable for men bred in, and frequented, areas in which
bodies of unmoving, fresh wather were plentiful. I did see a large, harmless
zarlit
fly, purple, about two feet long with four translucent wings, spanning about a
yard, humming over the surface of the water then alighting and, on itтАЩs
padlike
feet, daintily picking its way across the surface. I flicked a salt leach from
the
side of my light craft with the corner of the tem-wood paddle.
On river barges, for hundreds of pasangs, I had made my way down the
Vosk, but where the mighty Vosk began to break apart and spread into its
hundreds of shallow, constantly shifting channels, becoming lost in the vast
tidal
marshes of its delta, moving toward gleaming Thassa, the Sea, I had abandoned
the barges, purchasing from rence growers on the eastern periphery of the
delta
supplies and the small rush craft which I now propelled through the rushes and
sedge, the wild rence plants.
I noticed that one of these rence plants had, tied about it, below the tuft
of stamens and narrow petals, a white cloth, re-cloth.
I paddled over to look at the cloth. I looed about myself, and was for
some time quiet, not moving. Then I moved past the plant, parting the rence
and passing throug.