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

The men can no longer look at each other.

They approached Temur's great encampment, and the black stormcloud covered the
rest of the day, causing a darkness like night. Hair rose on the back of Bold's neck.
A few big raindrops splashed down, and thunder rolled out of the west like giant
iron cartwheels overhead. They hunkered down in their saddles and kicked the
horses on, reluctant to return in such a storm, with such news. Temur would take it
as a portent, just as they did. Temur often said that he owed all his success to an

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 Robinson, Kim Stanley - The Years of Rice and Salt


asura that visited him and gave him guidance. Bold had witnessed one of these
visitations, had seen Temur engage in conversation with an invisible being, and
afterwards tell people what they were thinking and what would happen to them. A
cloud this black could only be a sign. Evil in the west. Something bad had
happened back there, something worse even than plague, maybe, and Temur's plan
to conquer the Magyars and the Franks would have to be abandoned; he had been
beaten to it by the goddess of skulls herself. It was hard to imagine him accepting
any such preemption, but there they were, under a storm like none of them had ever
seen, and all the Magyars were dead.

Smoke rose from the vast camp's cooking fires, looking like a great sacrifice, the
smell familiar and yet distant, as if from a home they had already left for ever. Psin
looked at the men around him. 'Camp here,' he ordered. He thought things over.
'Bold.'

Bold felt the fear shoot through him.

'Come on.'

Bold swallowed and nodded. He was not courageous, but he had the stoic manner
of the qa'uchin, Temur's oldest warriors. Psin also would know that Bold was aware
they had entered a different realm, that everything that happened from this point
onwards was freakish, something preordained and being lived through inexorably,
a karma they could not escape.

Psin also was no doubt remembering a certain incident from their youths, when the
two of them had been captured by a tribe of taiga hunters north of the Kama River.
Together they had staged a very successful escape, knifing the hunters' headman
and running through a bonfire into the night.

The two men rode by the outer sentries and through the camp to the Khan's tent. To
the west and north lightning bolts crazed the black air. Neither men had ever seen
such a storm in all their lives. The few little hairs on Bold's forearms stood up like
pig bristles, and he felt the air crackling with hungry ghosts, pretas crowding in to
witness Temur emerge from his tent. He had killed so many.