"Gene Wolfe - New Sun 4 - The Citadel of the Autarch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

drank again, and then again, until I could hold no more, then took
off my clothes and washed myself, cold though it was. When I had
finished my bath and dressed and returned to the place where the
path crossed the stream, I saw two pug marks on the other side,
daintily close together, where the animal had crouched to drink.
They overlay the hoofprints of the officer's mount, and each was as
big as a dinner plate, with no claws showing beyond the soft pads of
the toes. Old Midan, who had been my uncle's huntsman when I
was the girl-child Thecla, had told me once that smilodons drink
only after they have gorged themselves, and that when they have
gorged and drunk they are not dangerous unless molested. I went on.
The path wound through a wooded valley, then up into a saddle
between hills. When I was near the highest point, I noticed a tree
two spans in diameter that had been torn in half (as it appeared) at
about the height of my eyes. The ends of both the standing stump
and the felled trunk were ragged, not at all like the smooth chipping
of an ax. In the next two or three leagues I walked, there were
several score like it. Judging from the lack of leaves, and in some
cases of bark, on the fallen parts, and the new shoots the stumps had
put forth, the damage had been done at least a year ago, and perhaps
longer.


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At last the path joined a true road, something I had heard of often,
but never trodden except in decay. It was much like the old road the
uhlans had been blocking when I had become separated from Dr.
Talos, Baldanders, Jolenta, and Dorcas when we left Nessus, but I
was unprepared for the cloud of dust that hung about it. No grass
grew upon it, though it was wider than most city streets.
I had no choice except to follow it; the trees about it were thick set,
and the spaces between them choked with brush. At first I was
afraid, remembering the burning lances of the uhlans; still, it
seemed probable that the law that prohibited the use of roads no
longer had force here, or this one would not have seen as much
traffic as it clearly had; and when, a short time later, I heard voices
and the sound of many marching feet behind me, I only moved a
pace or two into the trees and watched openly while the column
passed.
An officer came first, riding a fine, champing blue whose fangs had
been left long and set with turquoise to match his bardings and the
hilt of his owner's estoc. The men who followed him on foot were
antepilani of the heavy infantry, big shouldered and narrow waisted,
with sun-bronzed, expressionless faces. They carried three-pointed
korsekes, demilunes, and heavy-headed voulges. This mixture of
armaments, as well as certain discrepancies among their badges and
accouterments, led me to believe that their mora was made up of the