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

But it was different to come on a town where there had been no battle, and find everyone there already
dead. Long dead; bodies dried; in the dusk and moonlight they could see the gleam of exposed bones,
scattered by wolves and crows. Bold repeated the Heart Sutra to himself. 'Form is emptiness, emptiness
form. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. 0, what an Awakening! All hail!'

The horses stalled on the outskirts of the town. Aside from the cluck and hiss of the river, all was still.
The squinted eye of the moon gleamed on dressed stone, there in the middle of all the wooden buildings.
A very big stone building, among smaller stone buildings.

Psin ordered them to put cloths over their faces, to avoid touching

anything, to stay on their horses, and to keep the horses from touching anything but the ground with their
hooves. Slowly they rode through narrow streets, walled by wooden buildings two or three storeys high,
leaning together as in Chinese cities. The horses were unhappy but did not refuse outright.

They came into a paved central square near the river, and stopped before the great stone building. It was
huge. Many of the local people had come to it to die. Their lamasery, no doubt, but roofless, open to the
sky unfinished business. As if these people had only come to religion in their last days; but too late; the
place was a boneyard. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. Nothing moved, and it
occurred to Bold that the pass in the mountains they had ridden through had perhaps been the wrong
one, the one to that other west which is the land of the dead. For an instant he remembered something, a
brief glimpse of another life a town much smaller than this one, a village wiped out by some great rush
over their heads, sending them all to the bardo together. Hours in a room, waiting for death; this was why
he so often felt he recognized the people he met. Their existences were a shared fate.

'Plague,' Psin said. 'Let's get out of here.'

His eyes glinted as he looked at Bold, his face was hard; he looked like one of the stone officers in the
imperial tombs.

Bold shuddered. 'I wonder why they didn't leave,' he said.

'Maybe there was nowhere to go.'

Plague had struck in India a few years before. Mongols rarely caught it, only a baby now and then. Turks
and Indians were more susceptible, and of course Temur had all kinds in his army, Persians, Turks,
Mongols, Tibetans, Indians, Tajiks, Arabs, Georgians. Plague could kill them, any of them, or all of them.
If that was truly what had felled these people. There was no way to be sure.

'Let's get back and tell them,' Psin said.

The others nodded, pleased that it was Psin's decision. Temur had told them to scout the Magyar Plain
and what lay beyond, west for four days' ride. He didn't like it when scouting detachments returned
without fulfilling orders, even if they were composed of his oldest qa'uchin. But Psin could face him.

Back through moonlight they rode, camping briefly when the horses
got tired. On again at dawn, back through the broad gap in the mountains the earlier scouts had called the
Moravian Gate. No smoke from any village or hut they passed. They kicked the horses to their fastest
long trot, rode hard all that day.