"Adams, Robert - Castaways in Time 05 - Of Myths and Monsters 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Robert)
In memory of Robert A. Heinlein 1907-1988
PROLOGUE
In one of the larger cities of an Eastern Seaboard state of the United States of America, in the first year of the last quarter of the twentieth century, a man sat at a desk in a modest office which was located in a building that, though it once had been the mansion of a well-to-do family, was now become one- and two-room offices. The man resembled in his physical appearance, dress, and usual manner only what he was supposed to resemble, a businessman of indeterminate age but probable middle years, a run-of-the-mill, middle-class American who was possessed of sufficient business acumen to afford to dress well, drive a midpriced but new auto, pay his bills on time and in full. A bachelor who had been known to make allusions to one or more former wives, he occasionally wined and dined and otherwise entertained acquaintances of the female persuasion and later, in his comfortable apartment, often shared sex with them. That he never allowed any serious or lasting relationships with them to develop was usually ascribed to his understandable fear of repeating the pain of his late marriage or marriages.
In fact, the man was nothing of the sort. In the strictest sense, he was not even a man-male, but not human, not completely human, at least. Not that there had not once been a truly human man just like this being, but he had died and his husk had been used as the pattern for fashioning the body that this being now inhabited; his brain and selected portions of several others had been skillfully merged to occupy the skull of this "man" by a technology so far beyond the "man's" present contemporaries as to be unbelievable.
Although other beings considered this being to be almost young, still had the being been in existence in one or another form for almost half a millennium, by the standards of authentic men.
He sat at the desk, speaking in a conversational tone although he was alone in the office. The language in which he spoke, however, was one incomprehensible to any save two or three other beings like himself on all the earth. He spoke to a dimly pulsing spot of light that hovered in the air before him, its glow all but invisible in the shafts of sunlight spearing between the slats of the window blinds.
"I am certain that it is more well-meant idiocy on the parts of those cretins who are mining the easternmost reaches of the largest northern-hemisphere continent of the world we call 3-9-23-1. It is but more proof of what has been said by beings before this: Their available technologies have far outstripped their intellect and judgment and, are they not more strictly controlled and guided in the proper ways, they will eventually be the innocent instigators of real difficulties for all of us.
"In an attempt to return certain humans to this world which is my current station of duty, said humans having been plucked into the world of 3-9-23-1 by way of a malfunctioning primitive projector out of the world that we call 3-9-18-20, they managed to instead lose all of them somehow, on exactly which world and in exactly which line of time I have yet to ascertain.
"I came upon all of this by way of purest accident. I was called upon in the line of work that this creature I here am conducts to investigate disappearances of valuable items from the properties of a firm that specializes in the sale and resale of weapons of many varieties. Seated with the senior officer of the parent firm in his office, I was able to sense the afterglow of one of the carriers used by the miners of 3-9-23-1. This alerted me and I was caused to recall that close relatives of this very man had but recently disappeared under most singular circumstances. He had, indeed, asked me to investigate those disappearances, and I had so done, my conclusions having been reported to you higher beings in my report #11.523LSP12RF.
"Had immediate remedial action been taken at that time, doubtless none of the present threatened problems would be occurring; but the circumstances prevented speedy action, I was informed, and so we now are faced with the result. I will be unable to report on the degree of gravity of this result until I can discover just where and when these subjects were projected, of course.
"The artifacts being apparently projected from this world are very oddly assorted, and many of the varieties of foods and weapons have disappeared in quantities much larger than the ten or twelve human projectees could use themselves, so I must assume that they are giving them or selling them to humans indigenous to that time and world, and all of us are unpleasantly aware of the certain outcome of such interference if it is allowed to go on for any length of time. It was interferences akin to this, allowed by the lesser ones who preceded us, that brought about the sorry state of affairs now so bedeviling us.
"It is for this reason that I send this report and why I most urgently request that my other duties be either assigned to other beings or allowed to be suspended until I can put this dangerous matter to rights. The only viable alternative will be to assign an emergency team of beings to the situation, with all that attends to such assignment and preparations of the beings for it.
My report is now concluded."
Immediately his last syllable was pronounced, the dimly pulsing light winked out of existence.
CHAPTER
THE FIRST
His name was Brian, the eighth man of that name to reign as Ard-Righ or High King of Eireann or Ireland, but Brian VIII was only seen on documents or used orally by a filid as he sang the long, rhymed, often rambling genealogical records that had never been written in all the many centuries they had been compiled.
He was called Brian the Burly, and burly he was. Scion of a long line of warriors, fighting monarchs and fighting chiefs, he was obviously their true get. Although not truly a tall man, he nonetheless gave a first impression of size, of massivity; though well formed and graceful, his hands were large, strong, hairy-backed, and heavily scarred. His frame was all big bones and rolling muscles sheathing them, the hips as wide as the shoulders that looked almost too broad and thick for his body. His head rested on a neck nearly as thick as the head itself. His lower extremities, though no less solid and strong than his arms, were clearly those of a horseman, with flat thighs. Now, in his middle years, his waist was beginning to thicken slightly and strands of grey were appearing in his hair and beard, but still he looked as powerful, vital, and incipiently dangerous as ever he had in the past.
And Ard-Righ Brian the Burly was indeed dangerous in many a way. In his prime, few men in all of Eireann had been his match with the fearsome Danish-style axe he favored, ahorse or afoot; and even now, when he was in his fifties, many a younger man would be inclined to think twice before meeting the monarch in lists or on field of battle. But as deadly an opponent as he certainly was sitting his spotted destrier in armor grasping his fearsome axe, this was not the only danger he represented ... or even the most significant.
For Brian was not only physically strong, he was possessed of wealth and power, wealth, power, and an ambition that gnawed at him without cease, waking and sleeping. Countless men had died, countless gallons of blood had been shed, in his years-long attempts to assuage the pangs of his ambition, and, ruthless as he was, he stood quite prepared and ready to see half the male population of the entire island done to death if it would achieve his ends.
For years without number, Brian's paramount title, High King, had been mostly a mockery, for the high kings had held no more land than any of the other kings in Eireann, had had no hint of true sovereignty over these other kings, in fact, had acted as little better than a referee in wars between kings and kings, kings and would-be kings and the like. Brian's sire and predecessor had envisioned an Eireann over which the high kings would hold such sway as the kings of other lands-England, Scotland, France, Norway, Denmark, and Aragon-did over theirs, and he had inculcated his son with an equally driving ambition from his very earliest years.
Of course, Brian did not, would not, could not admit to the fact that personal ambition drove him, rather did he often cite his desire to bring to an end, once and for all, the small wars between the kings that had, for year after year, century after century, racked and impoverished what could have been a rich, fertile, productive land and people. These citations, however, were only taken at face value by foreigners who did not know him or know him well; his kingly opponents in Eireann knew better. And foreigners of any intelligence or intuitiveness who served him or had any depth of dealings with him for any length of time quickly sensed a real difference between that in which Brian believed and that in which he wished others to believe he believed.
Such men as these were three condottieri temporarily resident in widely separated portions of Eireann. One was an Italian-4Jer Timoteo, U Duce di Bolgia- who had, along with his justly famous condotta, been hired by one Cardinal D'Este and sent to the Irish Kingdom of Munster to help to modernize its existing army and hold it against the incursions of the High King for the Church and the House of Fitz Gerald, scions of which had been its kings for centuries-the second was also an Italian, actually, the full brother of the first, Roberto, and he now reigned as an Irish king over the kingdom called Ulaid, in the northeast of the island. Righ or King Roberto, who had realized even as the ancient crown of Ulaid was lowered upon his brow that his small, weak, impoverished little holding had had all the chance of a wet snowball on a hot griddle against the power and the wealth of the grasping High King, had sought about and then made the short sea journey to the Hebrides Islands, where-after certain negotiations-he had given over the Kingdom of Ulaid to Sir Aonghus, Regulus of the Isles, then received it back of the powerful old man as a feoff.
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