"Jack vance - Tschai 2 - Servants of the Wankh" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

Waste, over Achenkin Strait to the city Nerv, then south down the coast of
Charchan to Cath. For the raft to fail at any stage of the journey short of Nerv
meant disaster. As if to emphasize the point, the raft gave a single small jerk,
then once more flew smoothly.
The day passed. Below rolled the Dead Steppe, dun and gray in the wan light
of Carina 4269. At sunset they crossed the great Yatl River and all night flew
under the pink moon Az and the blue moon Braz. In the morning low hills showed
to the north, which ultimately would swell and thrust high to become the
Ojzanalais.
At midmorning they landed at a small lake to refill water tanks. Traz was
uneasy. "Green Chasch are near." He pointed to a forest a mile south. "They hide
there, watching us."
Before the tanks were full, a band of forty Green Chasch on leap-horses


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lunged from the forest. Ylin-Ylan was perversely slow in boarding the raft.
Reith hustled her aboard; Anacho thrust over the lift-arm-perhaps too hurriedly.
The engine sputtered; the raft pitched and lurched.
Reith ran aft, flung up the housing, pounded the black case. The sputtering
stopped; the raft lifted only yards ahead of the bounding warriors and their
ten-foot swords. The leap-horses slid to a halt, the warriors aimed catapults
and the air streamed with long iron bolts. But the raft was five hundred feet
high; one or two of the bolts bumped into the hull at the height of their
trajectory and fell away.
The raft, shuddering spasmodically, moved off to the east. The Green Chasch
set off in pursuit; the raft, sputtering, pitching, yawing, and occasionally
dropping its bow in a sickening fashion gradually left them behind.
The motion became intolerable. Reith jarred the black case again and again
without significant effect. "We've got to make repairs," he told Anacho.
"We can try. First we must land."
"On the steppe? With the Green Chasch behind us?"
"We can't stay aloft."
Traz pointed north, to a spine of hills terminating in a set of isolated
buttes. "Best that we land on one of those flat-topped peaks."
Anacho nudged the raft around to the north, provoking an even more alarming
wobble; the bow began to gyrate like an eccentric toy.
"Hang on!" Reith cried out.
"I doubt if we can reach that first hill," muttered Anacho.
"Try for the next one!" yelled Traz. Reith saw that the second of the buttes,
with sheer vertical walls, was clearly superior to the first-if the raft would
stay in the air that long.
Anacho cut speed to a mere drift. The raft wallowed across the intervening
space to the second butte, and grounded. The absence of motion was like silence
after noise.
The travelers descended from the raft, muscles stiff from tension. Reith
looked around the horizon in disgust: hard to imagine a more desolate spot than
this, four hundred feet above the center of the Dead Steppe. So much for his