"Jennifer Roberson - Sword Dancer 5 - Sword Born" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Jennifer)

who'd done more than any to make me a man in all the ways one can be. While
the rest of the Salset ridiculed me as a chula, a slave, as an over-tall, long-
limbed, big-boned boy awkward in body, in mind, wholly ignorant of grace, Sula
had valued me. In her bed, to start with. Later, in her heart.

Mother. Sister. Lover. Wife. Yet neither bound by blood, rites, or ritual beyond
the one we made at night, when I was allowed to sleep somewhere other than
on a filthy, odorous goatskin flung down upon Punja sand. But Sula was dead of
a demon in her breast, and there was no one to tell me now.

We left, too, because I was, well, a messiah. Or so some people believed.
Others, of course, didn't buy any of it. People are funny that way. Some believe
because of faith, needing no evidence; others have faith only in evidence--and I
had not, apparently, offered any of worth.

At least, not the kind they believed in. After all, turning the sand to grass--or so
the legendary prophecy went--was not the kind of imagery that really grabs a
man, especially Southroners. It was a little too, I don't know, pastoral for them,
who suckled sand with their mother's milk.

Whether I was the messiah, called jhihadi, and whether I had turned the sand to
grass (or at least begun the process), was open to debate. Both were possible,
I'd decided in a fit of self-aggrandizement fostered by too much aqivi and too
little of, well, Del's admiration and affection one night beneath the moon, if one
took the magic out of it and depended on a literal faith.

That's always a problem, dealing with religion. People take imagery literally. Or
when the truth is presented as something unutterably tedious--such as digging
canals and ditches to channel water from places with it to places without it--no
one wants to listen. It's not flowery enough. Not magical enough.

Hoolies, but I hate magic. Even when I work it myself.

Having established once again that my bunk was not a particularly promising
location for assignations of admiration and affection--I nearly smacked my head
again, while Del cracked an elbow hard enough to provoke a string of hissed and
dramatic invective (in uplander, which saved my tender ears)--we eventually
wandered up onto the deck to greet the morning with something less than
enthusiasm, and to placate discontented bellies with the sailor's bounty the crew
called hardtack. Hard it was; anyone lacking teeth would starve to death.
Fortunately neither Del nor I did, so we managed to gag it down with a few
swallows of tepid water (Del) or a belly-burning liquor called rhuum (me). Then
we stood at the rail and stared in morosely thoughtful silence at the wind-
rumpled water, wondering when (or if) we'd ever see land again. It had been
two days since we'd left behind a string of small islands where we'd stopped long
enough to take on fresh water and fruit.

"Maybe it's not a real place," I observed, only half-serious, which, as usual with
Del, provoked a literal response.