"Sheri S. Tepper - After Long Silence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

wagon passed. Tasmin noted one or two that were growing closer to the road than was safe. He had not
brought demolition equipment along on this trip, and in any case he preferred to pass the word and leave
it to the experts. He made quick notes, sighting on the horizon.

The balloon-tired wagon was quiet. The mules wore flexible cushioned shoes. There were no rattling
chains or squeaking leathers. More than one party had met doom because of noisy equipmentтАФor so it
was assumed. They rode silently, Jamieson on the seat of the wagon, Tasmin and the students on their
soft-shod animals. Pan of the sense of mystery came from this apprehensive quiet. Pan came from the
odors that always seemed to heighten Tasmin's perception of the world around him. Part came from the
intrinsic unlikelihood of what they would attempt to do.

That unlikelihood became evident when they wound their way to the top of the mighty north-south
rampart and looked down at what waited there. At Tasmin's gesture, they gathered closely together, the
mules crowded side to side.

"What you see before you, people," Tasmin whispered, "is the so-called easy side of the Watchers." He
didn't belabor the point. They needed only a good look at what loomed on either side of their path.

Before them the road dropped abruptly downward to curve to the left around the South Watcher. A few
dozen South Watchlings stood at the edge of the road, tapering monoliths of translucent green and blue
with fracture lines splitting the interiors into a maze of refracted light, the smallest among them five times
Tasmin's height. Behind the Watchlings began the base of the South Watcher itself, a looming tower of
emerald and sapphire, spilling foliage from myriad ledges, crowned with flights of gyre-birds that rose in a
whirling, smokelike cloud around the crest, five hundred feet above.

On the north side of the road a crowd of smaller North Watchlings shone in hues of amethyst and
smoke, and the great bulk of the North Watcher hung above them, a cliff formed of moonstone and ashy
quartz, though chemists and geologists argued that the structure of the Watcher was not precisely either
of these. In his mind, Tasmin said "emerald" and "moonstone" and "sapphire." Let the chemists argue
what they really were; to him whether they were Presences hundreds of feet tall, or 'lings a tenth that size,
or 'lets, smaller than a man, they were all sheer beauty.

Between the Watchers, scattered among the Watchlings, was the wreckage of many wagons and a
boneyard of human and animal skeletons, long since picked clean. Behind the Watchers to both north
and south extended the endless line of named and unnamed Presences that made up the western rampart
of Deepsoil Five, cutting it off from the rest of the continent except through this and several similar passes
for which proven Passwords existed.

Jamieson feigned boredom by sprawling on the trip wagon seat, although he himself had only been out
twice before. Refnic, James, and Clarin perched on their mules like new hats at spring festival, so recently
accoutered by the citadel Tripmaster as to seem almost artificial, like decorated manikins. "Put your
hoods back," Tasmin advised them quietly. "Push up your sleeves and fasten them with the bands. That's
what the bands are for, and it gets your hands out in the open where you need them. I know the sleeves
are stiff, but they'll soften up in time." Tasmin's own robes were silky from repeated washings and
mendings. The embroidered cuffs fell in gentle folds from the bands, and the hood had long ago lost its
stiff lining. "Put the reins in the saddle hook to free your hands. That's it."

With heads and arms protruding from the Tripsingers' robes, the students looked more human and more
vulnerable, their skulls looking almost fragile through the short hair that had been allowed to grow in
anticipation of their robing but was still only an inch or so long. They could not take their eyes from the