"Andre Norton - Yurth Burden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

Yurth Burden
b Andre Norton

1.

The Raski girl made Demon Horns with two fingers of her left hand and spat b
etween them. That droplet of moisture landed, dust covered, on the rutted cl
ay of the road just missing the edge of Elossa's stained travel cloak. She d
id not look at the girl but kept her eyes turned to those distant mountain r
ises, her goal.

In the town hate was a foul cloud to stifle her. She should have avoided th
e village. None of Yurth blood ever went into one of the native holdings if
they could help it. Broadcast hate so deep gnawed at one's Upper Sense, cl
ouded reception, muddied the thoughts. But she had had to have food. A tumb
le on a stream's stepping stones in the past evening dusk had turned the su
pplies she carried in her belt pouch into a sticky mess she had jettisoned
that morning.

The merchant whose stall she had visited had been surly and sullen. However
, he had not had the courage to refuse her when she made a quick choice. Al
l those eyes, and the waves of hate. . . . Now, when she judged she was wel
l beyond the girl who had given her that last salute, Elossa walked faster.

A Yurth man or woman moved with dignity among the Raski, just as they ign
ored the natives, looking over and around them as if they were not Yurth
and Raski were as different as light and dark, mountain and plain, heat a
nd cold. There was no common ground for their meeting ever.

Yet they shared the same world, ate the same food, breathed the same air. Eve
n some among her kin had dark hair resembling that the Raski wore in tight ro
lls about their heads, and their skins were not unlike in color. That of the
Raski might be brown by birth, but the Yurth, living as they did ever under t
he sky and the fierce sun, also tanned darkly. Put a Yurth, even herself, int
o the bodice and ankle-sweeping skirt of the girl who had so graphically made
her hate clear, let her hair grow and twist it up, and she might have looked
no, or little, different. It was only in the mind, she thought, that Yurth s
tood apart.

It had always been so. The Upper Sense was a Yurth child's from birth. He o
r she was trained in its use before plain talk came from the lips. For the
Upper Sense was all which stood between them and utter annihilation.
Zacar was not an easy world. Storms of terrible force came in the bleak sea
son, sealing Yurth clans into their mountain burrows, blasting, and overwhe
lming the towns and the dwelling on the plains. Wind, hail, freezing winds,
rain in drowning torrents. . . . All life sought shelter when those struck
. That is why the Pilgrimage was only possible during the two months of ear
ly autumn, why she must hurry to find her goal.

Elossa dug her staff point into the crumbling clay and turned aside from th