"S. M. Stirling - Draka 05 - Drakas!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

on, Luther. You'll have to lead us now."

***

The second day's march was even harder than the first. The sun seemed hotter, the bush denser, the
open stretches rockier; that was how it felt, at any rate, and certainly there was no doubt that the water
situation was much worseтАФfor Ubi and Jonas, they discovered while breaking camp, had thoughtfully
helped themselves to four of the canteens.

Late in the afternoon they reached the Bushman campsite and threw themselves on the ground around
the waterhole, only to find thatтАФas Custer had fearedтАФthere was no relief here. The cleft in the rock
was too narrow, the water too far down; none of them could get within reach. Only Pace and Hankins,
the smallest men in the group, even tried; and Pace gave up immediately, after getting dangerously stuck.

Hankins, however, refused to quit. "I can do it," he cried, wriggling an inch or two downward in the
fissure, lacerating his skin against the rough rock but paying no mind. He squirmed himself into a new
position, his right arm disappearing into the depths of the crack. "Just a little fu'therтАФ"

His eyes went suddenly huge; his mouth opened. "Oh, shit," he said softly, and then he screamed, and
kept on screaming as they hauled him free. His right hand had already begun to swell.

The scorpions of the Kalahari are not as instantly lethal as the mamba. It took Hankins the rest of the
afternoon to die. They piled rocks atop the body, having neither tools nor energy to dig a grave.

"Cursed," Luther Boss said, sitting down next to Custer in the evening, resting his back against an
acacia's spindly trunk. He picked up something white from the ground: a fragment of ostrich-egg shell.
The troopers had smashed all those they found, the day of the massacre, after draining their contents; you
never left anything that might help the survivors go on surviving.

"Africa is cursed," Boss went on in a strange voice. "The whole world is under a curse. A curse called
the white man."

"I don't agree." Custer didn't feel like talking, but the old man was obviously distraught. "The black
Africans used to kill Bushmen, and each other, even when they had the country to themselves. You know
that."

"True." Boss nodded slowly. "Yes, that's true. I was wrong. The name of the curse is mankind."

***

Just before sunrise Luther Boss shot himself. The noise was tremendous, waking everyone at once. They
gathered around, Custer holding a torch from the fire, and stared. The big double rifle hadn't left much of
Boss's head.

"Crazy old turd," Garvin said, "what'd he do that for?"

In the gray light of false dawn the four survivors piled a few token rocks atop the body and moved out.
The trail was fairly easy to follow at first, but then they lost it in a big patch of soft sand and it was a long
hot time before they found it again. By now the sun was high and the water almost gone.