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

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger

When Uricon the city stood:

'Tis the old wind in the old anger,

But then it threshed another wood

"It's a good poem," the younger woman riding beside her said.

Swindapa, Dhinwarn's daughter, of the Kurlelo lineage, lifted
her billed Coast Guard cap and shook her head. Droplets flew off
the clubbed pigtail that held long wheat-blond hair in check,
save for a few damp strands that clung to her oval,
straight-nosed face. Her smile showed white even teeth, and her
English-rose complexion was tanned by a decade of sun reflected
off the ocean.

She went on: "But why are so many Eagle People poems sad?
Don't you ever make poems about beer? Or roast venison and
playing with babies and making love in new-mown hay on warm
summer afternoons?"

One of the Marines riding behind them chuckled, barely
audible under the hiss of rain, the soughing and wind-creak of
branches, and the slow clop-plock of hooves in wet earth. Alston
smiled herself, a slight curve of her full lips.

"I've got gloomy tastes," she said. "If we're benighted out here
and we can find anything that'll burn, we can at least arrange the
venison." An extremely unlucky deer was slung gralloched across
one of their packhorses. "Still, he catches the area, doesn't he?"
she went on, waving.

She'd visited here as a tourist before the EventтАФeven now her
mind gave a slight hitch; English tenses were not suited to time
travelтАФand the bones of the land were the same.

And the weather's just as lousy, she thought, sneezing.

But there were no lush hedge-bordered fields here, no
half-timbered farmhouses or little villages with pubs where you
sat with the ghosts of cavaliers and highwaymen, no ruined
castles and Norman churches, no shards of Roman
ViroconiumтАФUri-con, in Shropshire legend. No Iron Age hill
forts, either, on the "blue remembered hills." Not yet, and now
not ever, here. Sometimes back on Nantucket among the
buildings and artifacts of that future you could forget, or your
gut could forget. Forget that an entire historyтАФthree millennia of
people, being born and living, fighting and building and bearing