"Sheri S. Tepper - Awakeners 2 - Southshore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

SOUTHSHORE-Awakeners 2


SOUTHSHORE-Awakeners 2
Sheri S Tepper

[23 feb 2002тАФscanned for #bookz]
[29 mar 2002тАФproofed by cress]



1
When Pamra left Thou-ne, moving westward along the River road, some
thousand of the residents of Thou-ne went after her. Most of them were
provisioned to some extent, though there were some who went with no thought
for food or blankets, trusting in a providence that Pamra had not promised and
had evidently not even considered, Peasimy Plot, for all his seeming inanity, was
well provided for. He had a little cart with things in it, things he had been putting
by for some time. The widow Plot would have been surprised to find in it items
that had disappeared from her home over the last fifteen years or so. There were
others in Thou-ne who would have been equally surprised to find their long-lost
belongings assisting Peasimy in his journey.
The procession came to Atter, and though some of the Thou-neites dropped out of
the procession, many of Atter joined it. Pamra preached in the Temple there, to
general acclaim. Then came Bylme and Twarn-the-little, then Twarn-the-
bigтАФwhere the townspeople made Pamra a gift of a light wagon in which she
might ride, pulled by her followersтАФthen a dozen more towns, and in each of
them the following grew more numerous, the welcome more tumultuous. Peasimy
himself began to appoint "messengers" to send ahead with word of their coming.
It was something that came to him, all at once. "Light comes," he told them. "That
is what you must say." As time went on, the messages grew more detailed and
ramified, but it was always Peasimy who sent them.
It was on a morning of threatening cloud that they left Byce-barrens for the town
of Chirubel.
The storm did not precisely take them by surprise; the day had brought increasing
wind and spatters of rain from very near dawn until midafternoon. Still, when in

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late afternoon the full fury of the wind broke over them and the skies opened, the
multitude were in nowise prepared for it. Some stopped where they were,
crawling under their carts or pitching their tents as best they might, to cower
under them out of the worst of the downpour. Others fled into the woods, where
they sought large trees or overhanging ridges. Pamra, high on her wagon, simply
pointed ahead with one imperious ringer, and the men who dragged the wagon,
half-drowned by the water flowing over their faces, staggered on into the deluge.
It was not until they stumbled into the outer wall of the Jarb House that they
realized she had pointed toward it all along. Pamra came down from the wagon,