"Tad Williams - Otherland 1 - City of Golden Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

and sometimes transposed Bushman thoughts and songs and stories. Fiction has its own demands.
But the Bushmen's old ways are indeed disappearing fast. One of my most dubious bits of truth-
manipulation may turn out to be the simple assertion that there will be _anyone_ left pursuing the
hunter-gatherer life in the bush by the middle of the twenty-first century.
However I have trimmed the truth, I have done my best to make the spirit of my portrayal
accurate. If I have offended or exploited, I have failed. My intent is primarily to tell a story,
but if the story leads some readers to learn more about the Bushmen, and about a way of life that
none of us can afford to ignore, I will be very happy.

-------------------------

Foreword

It started in mud, as many things do.
In a normal world, it would have been time for breakfast, but apparently breakfast was not
served in hell; the bombardment that had begun before dawn showed no signs of letting up. Private
Jonas did not feel much like eating, anyway.
Except for a brief moment of terrified retreat across a patch of muddy ground cratered and
desolate as the moon, Paul Jonas had spent all of this twenty-fourth day of March, 1918, as he had
spent the three days before, and most of the past several months--crouched shivering in cold,
stinking slime somewhere between Ypres and St Quentin, deafened by the skull-rattling thunder of
the German heavy guns, praying reflexively to Something in which he no longer believed. He had
lost Finch and Mullet and the rest of the platoon somewhere in the chaos of retreat--he hoped
they'd made it safely into some other part of the trenches, but it was hard to think about
anything much beyond his own few cubits of misery. The entire world was wet and sticky. The torn
earth, the skeletal trees, and Paul himself had all been abundantly spattered by the slow-falling
mist that followed hundreds of pounds of red-hot metal exploding in a crowd of human beings.
Red fog, gray earth, sky the color of old bones: Paul Jonas was in hell--but it was a very
special hell. Not everyone in it was dead yet.
In fact, Paul noted, one of its residents was dying very slowly indeed. By the sound of the
man's voice, he could not be more than two dozen yards away, but he might as well have been in
Timbuktu. Paul had no idea what the wounded soldier looked like--he could no more have voluntarily



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lifted his head above the lip of the trench than he could have willed himself to fly--but he was
all too familiar with the man's voice, which had been cursing, sobbing, and squealing in agony for
a full hour, filling every lull between the crash of the guns.
All the rest of the men who had been hit during the retreat had shown the good manners to die
quickly, or at least to suffer quietly. Paul's invisible companion had screamed for his sergeant,
his mother, and God, and when none of them had come for him, had kept on screaming anyway. He was
screaming still, a sobbing, wordless wail. Once a faceless doughboy like thousands of others, the
wounded man now seemed determined to make everyone on the Western Front bear witness to his dying
moments.
Paul hated him.

The terrible thumping roar subsided; there was a glorious moment of silence before the wounded