"Robert Reed - Good Mountain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

Jopale felt an easy pride toward his native woodтАФdense and fine -grained and v
dark, almost black in its deep reaches, with a thick cuticle and the pleasant odor of
sin-spice when sliced apart with steel saws. The woodтАЩs appearance and its telltale
genetics made it the offspring of Graytell and Sweetsap lineages. According to the old
nautical maps, an island matching that description first collided with the Continent near
was today Port of Krauss. But it didnтАЩt linger for long. In those ancient times, the Contin
turned like a gigantic if extraordinarily slow wheel, deep-water roots helping to hold its
face under the eternal sunshine. This tiny unnamed body clung to the wheelтАЩs outer ed
until it passed into the polar waters, and then it vanished from every record, probably d
off into the cold gloom.

Unable to grow, the island shrank. Hungry, it drank dry its sap reservoirs. It could
have brushed up against the Continent again, perhaps several more times, but some c
or chance storm always pushed it away again. Then it wandered, lost on the dark face
world. The evidence remained today inside its body. Its oldest wood was full of scars
purple-black knotsтАФa catalog of relentless abuse brought on by miserly times. Not ev
flicker of sunlight fell on its bleached surface. Starving, the island digested its deep-wa
roots and every vein of starch. Saprophytes thrived on its surface and giant worms gna
their way through its depths. But each of those enemies was a blessing, too. The talles
branches of the saprophytes caught the occasional breeze, helping the increasingly fra
island drift across the quiet water. And the worms ate so much of the island that it float
easily, buoyed up by the air-filled caverns.

Finally the near-corpse was pushed into the storm belt, and the storms blew just
carrying it out under the motionless sun. There the island turned a dark vibrant green a
dropping new roots that pulled minerals out of the nearly bottomless oceanтАФroots tha
flexed and rippled to help hold the island in the bright sunshine. And thatтАЩs when new w
was built, and rivers of sugary sap, and a multitude of colonists began to find their way
shores, including JopaleтАЩs distant ancestors.

Twelve hundred years ago, the island again collided with the Continent. But this t
it struck the eastern shore, as far from Port of Krauss as possible. Its leeward edge pu
into the Plain of Perfect Deeds while another free-drifting island barged in behind, pinn
in place. Two more islands arrived over the next several years. Small bodies like those
splintered between shifting masses, or they were tilted up on end, shattering when the
wood couldnтАЩt absorb the strain. Or sometimes they were shoved beneath the ancient
Continent, rotting to form black muck and anaerobic gases. But JopaleтАЩs homeland pro
both durable and extremely fortunate. Its wood was twisted into a series of fantastic rid
and deep valleys, but it outlasted each of the islands that came after it, its body finding
permanent nook where it could sit inside the worldтАЩs Great Mother.

By the time Jopale was born, his land was far from open water. The sun wobbled
the sky but never climbed too high overhead or dropped near any horizon. By then, mo
islands and two lesser continents had coalesced with the Continent, and the once-eleg
wheel had become an ungainly oval. Most of the worldтАЩs dayside face was covered wit
single unbroken lid too cumbersome to be turned. Competing wood had pushed the
weakest lands deep beneath the Ocean, and like the keel of a great boat, those corps
held the Continent in one stubborn alignment, only the strongest currents and the mos
persistent winds were able to force the oval toward the east or the west.