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

"What the hell," one of the troopers remarked as they rode on. "Already lost a man and we ain't even
got started. Bad sign."

Custer turned in his saddle. "No," he said with forced joviality, "it's a good sign. Thirteen men,
everybody knows that's an unlucky number. Now we're only twelve."

The trooper gave Custer a long stare. "Shit," he said finally. A wiry little man named Pace, he was from
Texas and seemed to think that proved something. "How do you add that up? I don't see but ten of us."

Then he glanced forward and made a face. "Oh, you counted them two niggers? Hell, ain't that just like a
bluebelly?"

The man riding behind him, a burly North Carolinian named Garvin, laughed out loud. "Jesus Christ,
Centuri'n, a nigger ain't a man. Ain't you learned that yet?"

His voice was loud enough to carry to the head of the troop, as Pace's had been, but if Ubi and Jonas
understood they gave no sign. Luther Boss, however, looked around and gave both men a glare that
would have stripped the hide off a hippo.

"Bluebellies," Pace said, ignoring the old man, and shook his head. "I'll never understand 'em."

***

The Kalahari is unusual, as deserts go; nothing like the naked wastes of the Sahara or the nearby Namib,
and in fact quite a lively place, considering the almost complete lack of surface water for most of the
year. The flat sandy plain wears a patchy covering of tall tough grasses, laced with hidden thorny
growths; clumps of thornbush and wind-bent acacias dot the landscape, while along the crests of the
occasional rocky hills groves of mongongo trees offer shade and edible fruit. Giraffe and various kinds of
antelope manage to live there, and jackals and brown hyenas; even, in the slightly wetter north, lions and
elephants.

In the rainy season, from around the end of October through the following March, an uninformed
observer might not recognize the Kalahari as a desert at all. Herds of animals come to the pans and
waterholes, while the grasses and trees turn cheerfully green.

By April the rains have ended; the pans begin to shrink and go dry. Hunting is good, though, because the
animals cluster more densely around the remaining sources of water; and the temperature drops, over the
next few months, until by June the days are pleasantly cool and the nights downright cold.

Now it was the end of August, and getting hot again, the grasses turned yellow and the pans long since
gone dust-dry. The animals had mostly migrated north, toward the Okavango country; there was always
a rise in cattle-rustling incidents, this time of year, when the scarcity of game drove the Bushmen to take
desperate risks.

Which, Custer reflected as the troop moved westward, was why this patrol had to deliver results; time
was running out. A few more weeks and the central Kalahari would be almost impassible for any humans
but BushmenтАФand even they would be holed up around the few permanent waterholes, traveling as little
as possible in the terrible heatтАФand would stay that way until the late-October rains. Even now, it was
hard to imagine how anyone or anything could live in this parched desolation.