"S. M. Stirling - Sea of Time 03 - On the Oceans of Eternity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

just nasty in every conceivable way.

Of course, asu was not a very prestigious occupation among
the Babylonians regardless of whether the doctor was a man or a
woman. Medicine and surgery were just treating symptoms, to
their way of thinking; the ashipu, the sorcerer/witch doctor, had
the real power.

As one of the physicians on call for the King's women,
Azzu-ena had been given the run of the Palace after her father
died, including its huge library of clay tablets; she had talked
much with foreigners, here where merchants and embassies
from all the known world sought the court of the King;
otherwise, she had been left mostly to herself and her thoughts.

"I see," she said at last. "Everything you have shown and told
me in this past year has been true, so this must be also. I knew
when I saw you cut the child from the wombтАФand yet the
mother lived!тАФthat your arts must be beyond oursтАж"

The doctor winced a little. Someone as intelligent as Azzu-ena
would think about the implications of the Event:

Your world is dead three thousand years. In most places that
means that nothing, nothing of what you love and what makes
up your inmost soul remains; your people, their poets and
Kings, their Gods and their dreams, their hates and fears, the
words your mother sang you to sleep with, all gone down into
dust and shadowтАФ

A little more of Babylon would endure, which perhaps would
be worse; to have those parched bones dug up and studied by an
academic curiosity equally dry.

"That's why we have arts that you don't," Justin went on
aloud. "We have three thousand years more historyтАж more time
to learn things."

The concept of development through time puzzled her at first;
Babylonians thought of history as decline from a previous Golden
Age, not of progress. They did know that there had been a time
before metal or agriculture, though; he reminded her of that,
and went on:

"And it's why we command so few of the arts we had before
the Event."

Her eyes went wide. "IтАж don't understand. You have
thunderbolts to knock down city walls, you can fly, your ships of
the ocean sail about the earth as if it were a pond, you really