"Andre Norton - Darkness and Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

horned head. She made a shambling run to the body of her calf, snorting in red rage. Then
crimson froth puffed from her wide nostrils and she stumbled to her knees and fell on her
side. Lura's round head shot up above a stand of thick grass and she moved out to the side
of her prey. Fors came from the trees where he had taken cover. He would have echoed
Lura's rasping purr had it been in his power. That arrow had gone straight and true to the
mark he had set it.
It was a pity to have to waste all that meat. Enough to keep three Eyrie families for a
week lay there. He prodded the cow with a regretful toe before starting to butcher the
calf.
He could, of course, try to jerk the meat. But he was unsure of the right method and
he could not carry it with him anyway. So he contented himself with preparing what he
could for the next few days while Lura, after feasting, slept under a bush, rousing now
and then to snap at the gathering flies.
They made camp that night a field or two beyond the kill, in the corner of an old wall.
Piles of fallen stone turned it into a position which could be defended if the need arose.
But neither slept well. The fresh meat they had left behind drew night rovers. There was a
scream or two which must have come from Lura's wild relatives and she growled in
answer. Then in the early dawn there was a baying cry which Fors was unable to identify,
woods learned as he was. But Lura went wild when she heard it, spitting in sheer hate,
her fur rising stiff along her backbone.
It was early when Fors started on, striking across the open fields in the line set by his
compass. Today he made no effort to keep cover or practice caution. He could see no
menace in these waste fields. Why had there been all the talk back in the Eyrie about the
danger in the lowlands? Of course, one did keep away from the "blue" patches where
radiation still meant death even after all these years. And the Beast Things were always to
be dreadedтАФhad not Langdon died in their attack? But as far as the Star Men had been
able to discover those nightmare creatures kept to the old cities and were not to be feared
in the open. Surely these fields must be as safe for man as the mountain forests which
encircled the Eyrie.
He took an easy curve and came out suddenly on a sight which brought him upтАФ
blinking. Here was a roadтАФbut such a road! The broken concrete was four times as wide
as any he had seenтАФit had really been two roads running side by side with a stretch of
earth between them, two wide roads running smoothly from one horizon to another.
But not two hundred yards from where he stood gaping, the road was choked with a
tangle of rusting metal. A barrier of broken machines filled it from ditch to ditch. Fors
approached it slowly. There was something about that monstrous wall which was
forbiddingтАФeven though he knew that it had stood so for perhaps three hundred years.
Black crickets jumped out of the weeds before him and a mouse flashed across a stretch
of clear stone.
He rounded the jumble of wrecked machines. They must have been traveling along
the road in a line when death had struck mysteriously, struck so that some of the
machines had rammed others or wavered off to pile up in wild wreckage. Others stood
solitary as if the dying driver had been able to bring them to a safe halt before he
succumbed. Fors tried to pick out the outlines and associate what he saw with the ancient
pictures. ThatтАФthat was certainly a "tank," one of the moving fortresses of the Old Ones.
Its gun still pointed defiantly to the sky. Two, four, five more he counted, and then gave
up.
The column of machines stretched out in its forgotten disaster for almost a mile. Fors
brushed along beside it in the waist-high weeds which bordered the road. He had an odd
distaste for approaching the dead machines more closely, no desire to touch any of the