"Adams, Robert - Castaways in Time 05 - Of Myths and Monsters 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Robert)

"Well, wherever, whenever they are, I sincerely wish them luck. I have a feeling they're going to need that and a whole lot more."

Dr. Lisa Peters found Arsen Ademian stomping up and down the length of the crypt, back into which he and she had moved as soon as a habitation had been built and approved by the overly picky Bedros Yacubian as home for him and his wife, Rose. Arsen was half-shouting obscenities in English, Armenian, and what she assumed was either Japanese or Vietnamese. In a corner, Simon Delahaye squatted quietly, watching Arsen and listening to him while skillfully mending a rent in the sleeve of a fatigue shirt.

"What's the problem now?" the tall, slender, blonde physician asked of no one in particular.

Simon answered her. "The noble Captain Arsen be most wroth at the continued lack of resolve of the old sachem, Squash Woman, and the council that sitteth with her, here. I much fear me that if Captain Arsen rage so for much longer he must assuredly burst his skull and his veins-all, my lady."

Only the touch of her cool hand, however, was required to stop Arsen's tantrum and start him explaining the outrages that had precipitated it. "Aw, goddammit, lisa, that fucking slimy old cunt, she and those so-called councillors, old farts, the whole damn bunch of the fuckers, they can't make up their goddam so-called minds on anything; they ain't done it yet, leastways, and I'm beginning to believe they won't ever. All they can ever, and her in particular, think about is gimme, gimme, gimme, bad as a bunch of welfare bums in our own world ever was."

lisa sighed. It was an old story and long since become a most unfunny one. "What are the desires of her Shawnee majesty now?"

Arsen shrugged disgustedly. "Oh, the usual shit, honey: more sides of beef and frozen turkeys, more fresh vegetables, more pots and pans and utensils, more salt and sugar, more dried fruits, more of damned near everything the cow-cunted old scab-sucking bitch can think of ... plus one other thing. She wants a silver sky boat and she says there will be no agreement to go west of the mountains until she has one of her own."

"A carrier?" demanded lisa. "Squash Woman wants us to give her one of the carriers as her price for letting us help her get her and her people out of reach of the Spanish slavers, out of harm's way? Arsen, you know that I've bent over backwards in months past trying to make excuses for that old woman and her actions and lack of same, but enough is enough. Her demands have by now become nothing less than extortionate. We can't work with a woman like her, so why don't we all just move over to that place beyond the mountains and leave her and her people to stew in their own juice until either they wise up and decide to follow us on their own or the Spanish come back and make those they don't kill wish they had taken us up on our offer while they still had the chance?"

But Arsen shook his head, slowly. "Naw, honey, I couldn't do nothing like that to these folks. They need us and they know it. Lots of them can't hardly wait to get over to this rich land in the west they've heard about; you've heard them asking about it, some have probably even asked you. It ain't their fault. Squash Woman and the rest of the sachems."

"Why the hell don't they just get rid of her and them, Arsen?" Lisa snapped. "Choose some leaders that will do more than eat and sleep and talk and make demands of us, that's what they need to do, you know. If they'd do that, I might start having some faith in them."

Arsen sighed. "You just don't know them, honey. They're a people bound by custom. They think that age makes people smarter, so the older they are, the smarter they're bound to be, see. Squash Woman is the oldest person in this place, so that makes her the top dog, see. They'd never even think of taking and putting anybody younger and dumber in her place, honey, and was we to suggest it to them, they'd wonder when we started using shit for brains, is all, they wouldn't get rid of her."

She made a face. "So, we just sit here while she thinks up more demands to make of us and you build your castle or whatever that thing is intended to someday be and we all wait for the damned Spanish to march or sail up here in force and we have to kill a lot more of them with terrible weapons that have never even been dreamed of yet, thank God, in this world, and you keep going off to rob our world-segments of it, anyway-blind just to feed the whims of a senile and greedy old woman, huh?"

Arsen looked just then a bit like a kicked puppy. "Honey, look, I can't really explain it all too clearly, but I feel like God or somebody put me down here, in this place and time, for a purpose. I think that purpose was to save these poor folks, and I mean to keep on trying to do it, no matter what I have to do to do it, no matter what it takes. I wish you could understand, honey, I really do."

It was her turn to sigh. "I do understand, in a way, Arsen. I understand that you are deeply motivated, and I respect you, love you for your obvious altruism. You've managed to live and function normally despite the hellish amounts of frustration that old woman has shoveled on you daily for a lot longer than the horny caveman that I thought you were when we were in the other world could ever have done. But, Arsen, even a stone saint can bear just so much weight before it cracks and crumbles, and I don't want to see you reach that stage. I ... Oh, damn, with all this. I forgot.

"Arsen, I took the river patrol for Mike, today, so that he could go hunting. The Spanish are still running around their town and fort like somebody had overturned an anthill, but they don't look ready to move out anytime soon. The only ship I could see down there was an oceangoing ship, far too deep-draught to make it this far upriver without coming to grief.

"But on the way back up here, I swung inland- don't ask me why, I don't know why-and I spotted a whole hell of a lot of Indians. They're on that trail back about a mile and a half west of the river. It looks like men, women, and children, plus dogs, donkeys, and even a few horses. I'd guesstimate that they're one or two days from here and headed this way. Some of the men wore turbans, so I'd guess that they're Creeks."

Arsen beamed the first full smile that she had seen light up his face in some time. "Well, that took less time than I could've dreamed it would.

"Simon, go find Soaring Eagle and a couple of the faster-running braves, tell them what they're looking for and about where to expect to find it, and send them out to guide those folks here, pronto."

After shrugging into the mended shirt, Simon tugged at his forelock, picked up the ornate Spanish broadsword without which he had never gone anywhere since the night he had prized it off a dead man, and ascended the stone steps to the outside, fitting swordcase to belt as he went.

"Simon," Arsen shouted after the man, "give the runners a rifle, a pistol, and the accessories for them to give to the sachem as a gift from me. Tell them to tell him that I'll give a rifle to each of his braves and teach them how to use it if he and they join with us in our anti-Spanish confederation here."

He grinned at lisa, saying, "God bless you, honey, I'm starting to get good vibes, really great vibes, again. Everything still might work out, you know, Squash Woman or no Squash Woman, damn her stinking old ass."

Bedros Yacubian, holding doctorates in both pathology and paleontology, had not been one of the group of dancers and band members accidentally projected into this world, though his wife had been. Arsen had gone back-after mastering the uses of the carrier that he had found in the crypt when they had landed with said crypt in the wilderness when some something had snatched them from out the comfortable suite in the country hall of the Archbishop of York, months back-to their old world and used one of the projectors that the carrier had explained to him how to fabricate to bring the erudite man to this world at the instigations of Greek John and lisa.

The safe, pleasant-looking, game-filled, and fertile land that Arsen had found beyond the western mountains was abrim with beasts the like of many of which he had never before either seen or heard described- shaggy elephantine creatures, long-horned buffalo, huge elk, leonine cats bigger by far than any lion or tiger in his own world and time, a shaggy canine as big as a Great Dane. Greek John, who in addition to being a member of the ill-fated band had been a practicing dentist in the other world, with one of his hobbies being the study of paleontology, had been taken over to see the singular beasts, and after the trip he had urged Arsen to bring in Bedros. Lisa had wanted the man brought in in order to assuage Rose's hunger to be again with her recently married husband.

But in the flesh, Bedros had proved to be arrogant, supercilious, patronizing, insulting, and the sort of person who found fault with everyone and everything he chanced to encounter. Moreover, he was extremely impressed with himself and knew himself to be far above doing any work not directly connected to his profession. So very difficult had it proved to get any sort of physical labor out of Bedros that Greg Sinclair, one of the band members, had made the remark that if the academic could find someone else to eat for him, urinate for him, and defecate for him, he would certainly give over those functions into that person's keeping. Of course, Greg had couched his words in basic, four-letter terms. At that point, Bedros had committed the cardinal error of slapping Greg's face, whereupon Greg had punched the man out.

Had not Rose been so obviously happy reunited with her husband, Arsen would long since have taken the man back to where he had been brought from. He would have taken them both back, except that Lisa frequently needed the help of a skilled nurse, and that was Rose. Therefore, he just managed to put up with Bedros and bade everyone else try to so do.