"David Zindell - Requiem of Homo Sapiens 01 - The Broken God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

it was a natural cathedral of gleaming obsidian, flowing rock
pendants hanging from ceiling to floor, and deep silences. Now,
in the cave of his ancestors, there was too much silence and
too much light. While Danlo had slept in the snow, Soli had
gathered faggots of bonewood and placed them at fifty-foot
intervals around the cave walls. He had set them afire. The
whole of the cave was awash with light, flickering orange and
ruby lights falling off the animal paintings on the walls,
falling deep into the cave's dark womb where the cold floor
rose up to meet the ceiling. Danlo smelled woodsmoke, pungent
and sweet, and the firelight itself was so intense it seemed to
have a fragrance all its own. And then he smelled something
else layered beneath the smells of wood, fur, and snow.
Touching every rock and crack of the cave, all around him and
through him, was the stench of death. Though he breathed
through his mouth and sometimes held his breath, he could not
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escape this terrible stench. The bodies of the dead were
everywhere. All across the snow-packed floor, his near-brothers
and sisters lay together in no particular order or pattern, a
heap of bent arms, hair, furs, rotting blood, thick Mack
beards, and dead eyes. They reminded Danlo of a shagshay herd
driven off a cliff. Leaving them inside their snowhuts until
burial would have been less work, but Soli had decided to move
them. The huts, the fifteen domes built of shaped snow blocks
in the belly of the cave, had kept the bodies too warm. The
smell of rotting flesh was driving the dogs mad and howling
with hunger, and so Soli had dragged the bodies one by one to
the cave's centre where they might freeze. Danlo worried that
Soli, tired as he was, might have left someone inside one of
the snowhuts by mistake. He told Soli of this worry, and Soli
quickly counted the bodies; there were eighty-eight of them,
the whole of the Devaki tribe. Danlo thought it was wrong to
count his kin one by one, to assign abstract numerals to human
beings who had so recently breathed air and walked over the
brilliant icefields of the world. He knew that each of them had
a proper name (except, of course, for the babies and very
little children who were known simply as 'son of Choclo' or
'Mentina's Second Daughter'), and he knew the names of each of
them, and he stood over the dead calling their names. 'Sanya,'
he said, 'Yukio, Choclo, Jemmu ... ' After a while his voice
grew thin and dry, and he began to whisper. Finally, he grew as
silent as Soli, who was standing beside him. He couldn't see
the faces of everyone to say their names. Some of the dead lay
face down, half buried in the snow. Others тАУ usually they were
babies тАУ were covered by the bodies of their mothers. Danlo
walked among the dead, looking for the man he called his
father. He found Haidar next to Chandra, the woman who had
adopted him when he was a newborn only a few moments old. They
were lying together, surrounded by Cilehe, Choclo and Old