"Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years Of Rice And Salt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Bold nodded again. 'I understand.'

Crossing the Sinai was like travelling with a caravan crossing one of the deserts of the heartland, except
this time Bold was walking with the slaves, in the cloud of dust at the back of the camel train. They were
part of the year's haj. Enormous numbers of camels and people had tramped over this road through the
desert, and now it was a broad dusty smooth swathe through rockier hills. Smaller parties going north
passed by to their left. Bold had never seen so many camels.

The caravanserai were beaten and ashy. The ropes tying him to his new master's other slaves were never
untied, and they slept in circles on the ground at night. The nights were warmer than Bold was used to,
and this almost made up for the heat of the days. Their master, whose name was Zeyk, kept them
wellwatered and fed them adequately at night and at dawn, treating them about as well as his camels,
Bold observed: a tradesman, taking care of the goods in his possession. Bold approved of the attitude,
and did what he could to keep the bedraggled string of slaves in good form. If they all kept the pace it
made the walking that much easier. One night he looked up and saw the Archer looking down on him,
and he remembered his nights alone in the empty land.

The ghost of Temur,
The last survivor of the fisherfolk,

The empty stone temples open to the sky, The days of hunger, the little mare,

That ridiculous bow and arrow,
A red bird and blue bird, sitting side by side.

They came to the Red Sea, and boarded a ship three or four times as long as the one that had brought
him to Alexandria, a dhow or zambuco, people called it both. The wind always blew from the west,
sometimes hard, and they hugged the western shore with their big lateen sail bellied out to the cast. They
made good time. Zeyk fed his string of slaves more and more, fattening them for the market. Bold happily
downed the extra rice and cucumbers, and saw the sores around his

ankles begin to heal. For the first time in a long time he was not perpetually hungry, and he felt as if he
was coming out of a fog or a dream, waking up more each day. Of course now he was a slave, but he
wouldn't always be one. Something would happen.

After a stop at a dry brown port called Massawa, one of the hajjira depots, they sailed east across the
Red Sea and rounded the low red cape marking the end of Arabia, to Aden, a big seaside oasis, indeed
the biggest port Bold had ever seen, a very rich town of green palms waving over ceramic roofs, citrus
trees, and numberless minarets. Zeyk did not disembark his goods or slaves here, however; after a day
on shore he came back shaking his head.

'Mombasa,' he said to the ship's captain, and paid him more, and they sailed south across the strait again,
around the horn and Ras Hafun, then down the coast of Zanj, sailing much farther south than Bold had
ever been. The sun at noon was nearly directly overhead, and beat down on them most cruelly all day,
day after day, with never a cloud in the sky. The air baked as if the world were an oven. The coast
appeared either dead brown or else vibrant green, nothing in between. They stopped at Mogadishu,
Lamu and Malinda, each a prosperous Arab trading port, but Zeyk got off only briefly at them.

As they sailed into Mombasa, the grandest harbour yet, they came on a fleet of giant ships, ships bigger
than Bold had imagined possible. Each one was as big as a small town, with a long line of masts down its