"02 - Sword Singer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Jennifer)

into the scrubby, hilly high desert that presaged the borderlands. Already it
was cooler than the scorching days spent on blinding sands, hiding vulnerable
eyes amidst the shade of burnous hoods.
Here there were tough, fibrous red-throated grasses, warring with other
groundcover; the tangle and tang of jade-hued creosote, haphazard in its growth;
vast armies of thorny trees with feathery silver-gray leaves. Even the bloom of
fragile flowers, unexpectedly tenacious, climbing out of the fretwork of webby
groundcover and the tassles of taller, duller grasses to wave fluted gaudy
petals, like pennons, in whatever breeze they could find.
Here there was water. Here there was game. Here there was the promise of a
survival less difficult than in the arid sea of sand known as the Punja.
Harquhal. It rises out of the desert like a blocky pile of mud, girded by
sloping hills and taupe-gray abode walls to hide its many faces from the threat
of capricious simooms blowing northward out of the Punja. It is a characteristic
of the South that towns, villages, semipermanent habitations, as well as the
countless oases, are warded with man-made walls or hills or natural rock
formations so that the deadly sandstorms, called simooms, cannot sweep away what
men, women and children have labored so hard to build. In the Punja, it is
necessity; the sands, never sated, swallow towns and cities whole if not
properly maintained, disdaining the curses of powerful tanzeers and the wretched
poor alike.
I have seen walls, left to crumble by lazy inhabitants, swept away in a matter
of hours, and the dwellings within destroyed by abrasive, voracious wind. I have
seen cisterns and natural springs filled permanently by choking sand, though we
have none to spare, in the South, in the Punja. I have seen scoured skeletons
eaten clean of even a shred of flesh; by no beast but the wind, the sand, the
heat. Horse, dog, goat. Man. Woman. Child.
There is no mercy in the South, from humans, beasts, elements. There is only the
way things are, and will be forever; ceaseless, unchanging, moved by no pleas
for leniency or forgiveness.
If there are gods who hear those pleas, they pass the time with fingers planted
firmly in useless ears.
Del sighed. "I thought, when I went home again, my brother would be with me."
So much said with so little. Del hoarded thoughts and feelings like a merchant
coin, dispensing each with grave deliberation and at unpredictable moments. She
had said nothing of Jamail for weeks, locking away in tenacious silence all the
pain born of a futile search.
For five years she had meticulously prepared herself to track down and free the
younger brother stolen by raiders for profitable commerce with Southron slavers
who knew the true value of blue-eyed, blond-haired Northern boys in a land of
dark-faced people. For five years she had apprenticed herself to a shodo--in
Northern lingo, an-kaidin--to learn the requirements of sword-dancing,
fashioning herself into a human weapon with the sole purpose of rescuing Jamail.
Knowing it was not perceived a woman's task; knowing also there was no one else
to do it. No one even to care; the raiders had robbed her of kin as well as
innocence.
Futile. No, not exactly. She had found Jamail, but there was little left to
rescue.
Tongueless, castrated, shaped in mind and body by years of Southron slavery,
Jamail was not the ten-year-old brother she had adored. Only a boy-man who could