"Kim Stanley Robinson - Years of Rice and Salt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Robinson, Kim Stanley - The Years of Rice and Salt




Tripitaka: Monkey, how far is it to the Western Heaven, the abode of Buddha?

Wu kong: You can walk from the time of your youth till the time you grow old, and
after that, till you become young again; and even after going through such a cycle a
thousand times, you may still find it difficult to reach the place where you want to
go. But when you perceive, by the resoluteness of your will, the Buddha nature in
all things, and when every one of your thoughts goes back to that fountain in your
memory, that will be the time you arrive at Spirit Mountain.

-- The Journey to the West

ONE

Another journey west, Bold and Psin find an empty land;

Temur is displeased, and the chapter has a stormy end.

Monkey never dies. He keeps coming back to help us in times of trouble, just as he
helped Tripitaka through the dangers of the first journey to the west, to bring
Buddhism back from India to China.

Now he had taken on the form of a small Mongol named Bold Bardash, horseman
in the army of Temur the Lame. Son of a Tibetan salt trader and a Mongol
innkeeper and spirit woman, and thus a traveller from before the day of his birth, up
and down and back and forth, over mountains and rivers, across deserts and
steppes, crisscrossing always the heartland of the world. At the time of our story he
was already old: square face, bent nose, grey plaited hair, four chin whiskers for a
beard. He knew this would be Temur's last campaign, and wondered if it would be
his too.

One day, scouting ahead of the army, a small group of them rode out of dark hills at
dusk. Bold was getting skittish at the quiet. Of course it was not truly quiet, forests
were always noisy compared to the steppe; there was a big river ahead, spilling its
sounds through the wind in the trees; but something was missing. Birdsong

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 Robinson, Kim Stanley - The Years of Rice and Salt


perhaps, or some other sound Bold could not quite identify. The horses snickered
as the men kneed them on. It did not help that the weather was changing, long
mares' tails wisping orange in the highest part of the sky, wind gusting up, air damp
-- a storm rolling in from the west. Under the big sky of the steppe it would have
been obvious. Here in the forested hills there was less sky to be seen, and the winds
were fluky, but the signs were still there.