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

killed a few babies, maybe made some adults sick. You killed rats or mice on sight, and if babies got
feverish and developed the bumps, their mothers took them out to live or die by the rivers. Indian cities
were said to have a worse time with it, people dying in great crowds. But never anything like this. It was
possible something else had killed them.

Travelling through empty land.

Clouds hazy, moon waning and chill. Sky, frostcoloured, cold to look at.

Wind piercing. Sudden terror.

A thousand trees roar in the sparse woodland: A lonely monkey cries on a barren hill.

But the terror washed through him and then away, like freshets of rain, leaving a mind as empty as the
land itself. It was very still. Gone, gone, altogether gone.

For a time he thought he would ride through and out of the region of plague, and find people again. But
then he came over a jagged range of black hills, and saw a big town spread below, bigger than any he
had ever seen, its rooftops covering a whole valley bottom. But deserted. No smoke, no noise, no
movement. In the centre of the city another giant stone temple stood open to the sky. Seeing it, the terror
poured into him again, and he rode into the forest to escape the sight of so many people gone like the
autumn leaves.

He knew roughly where he was, of course. South of here, he would eventually come into the Ottoman
Turks' holdings in the Balkans. He would be able to speak with them., he would be back in the world,
but
out of Temur's empire. Something then would start up for him, some way to live.

So he rode south. But still only skeletons occupied the villages. He grew hungrier and hungrier. He drove
the mare harder, while drinking more of her blood.

Then one night in the dark of the moon, all of a sudden there were howls and wolves were on them in a
snarling rush. Bold just had time to cut the mare's tether and scramble into a tree. Most of the wolves
chased the mare, but some sat panting under the tree. Bold got as comfortable as he could and prepared
to wait them out. When rain came they slunk away. At dawn he woke for the tenth time, climbed down.
He took off downstream and came on the body of the mare, all skin and gristle and scattered bones. The
sidebags were nowhere to be found.

He continued on foot.

One day, too weak to walk, he lay in wait by a stream, and shot a deer with one of the sorry little
arrows, and made a fire and ate well, bolting down chunks of cooked haunch. He slept away from the
carcass, hoping to return to it. Wolves couldn't climb trees, but bears could. He saw a fox, and as the
vixen had been his wife's nafs, long ago, he felt better. In the morning the sun warmed him. The deer had
been removed by a bear, it appeared, but he felt stronger with all that fresh meat in him, and pressed on.

He walked south for several days, keeping on ridges when he could, over hills both depopulated and
deforested, the ground underfoot sluiced to stone and baked white by the glare of the sun. He watched
for the vixen in the valleys at dawn, and drank from springs, and raided dead villages for scraps of food.
These grew harder and harder to find, and for a while he was reduced to chewing the leather strap from