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

somewhere to the north on the edge of a great lake, ready and waiting for the man lucky
and reckless enough to search it out.
"Ready and waitingтАФ" Fors repeated the words aloud. Then his hand closed almost
viciously on Lura's fur. She growled warningly at his roughness, but he did not hear her.
WhyтАФthe answer had been before him all along! Perhaps five years ago he could not
have tried itтАФperhaps this eternal waiting and disappointment had been for the best after
all. Because now he was readyтАФhe knew it! His strength and the ability to use it, his
knowledge and his wits were all ready.
No light yet showed below. The clouds were prolonging the night. But his time of
grace was short, he would have to move fast! The bow, the filled quiver, the sword, were
hidden between two rocks. Lura crawled in beside them to wait, his unspoken suggestion
agreeing with her own desires.
Fors crept down the twisted trail to the Eyrie and made for the back of the Star Hall.
The bunks of the Star Men on duty were all in the forepart of the house; the storage room
was almost directly before him. And luck was favoring him as it never had before, for the
heavy shutter was not bolted or even completely closed as his exploring fingers
discovered. After allтАФno one had ever dreamed of invading the Star Hall unasked.
Moving as noiselessly as Lura he swung over the high sill and stood breathing in a
light flutter. To the ordinary man of the Eyrie the room would have been almost pitch
dark. But, for once, Fors' mutant night sight was an aid. He could see the long table and
the benches without difficulty, make out the line of pouches hanging on the far wall.
These were his goal. His hand closed unerringly on one he had helped to pack many
times. But when he lifted it from its hook he detached the gleaming bit of metal pinned to
its strap.
To his father's papers and belongings he might prove some shadowy claim. But to
that Star he had no right. His lips twisted in a bitter grimace as he laid the badge down on
the edge of the long table before clambering back into the grayness of the outer world.
Now that the pouch swung from his shoulder he went openly to the storage house and
selected a light blanket, a hunter's canteen and a bag of traveler's corn kept in readiness
there. Then, reclaiming his weapons and the impatient Lura, he started offтАФnot toward
the narrow mountain valleys where all of his hunting had been done, but down toward the
forbidden plains. A chill born of excitement rather than the bite of the rising wind
roughened his skin, but his step was sure and confident as he hunted out the path blazed
by Langdon more than ten years before, a path which was not watched by any station of
the outpost guards.
Many times around the evening fires had the men of the Eyrie discussed the plains
below and the strange world which had felt the force of the Great Blow-up and been
turned into an alien, poisonous trap for any human not knowing its ways. Why, in the
past twenty years even the Star Men had mapped only four cities, and one of them was
"blue" and so forbidden.
They knew the traditions of the old times. But, Langdon had always insisted even
while he was repeating the stories to Fors, they could not judge how much of this
information had been warped and distorted by time. How could they be sure that they
were of the same race as those who had lived before the Blow-up? The radiation sickness,
which had cut the number of survivors in the Eyrie to less than half two years after the
war, might well have altered the future generations. Surely the misshapen Beast Things
must once have had a human originтАФor had they? Men were playing with the very stuff
of life before the Blow-up. And the Beast Things clung to the old cities where the worst
mutations had occurred.
The men of the Eyrie had records to prove that their forefathers had been a small band