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

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

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 Robinson, Kim Stanley - The Years of Rice and Salt


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.

As they came down the long eastern slope of the range back onto the steppe, an
enormous wall of cloud reared up in the western half of the sky,

Like Kali's black blanket pulling over them,

The Goddess of Death chasing them out of her land. Solid black underside fluted
and rippled,

Black pigs' tails and fishhooks swirling into the air below. A portent so bleak the
horses bow their heads,