"Campbell, John W Jr - The Elder Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

He looked at it resentfully. "You took my ship, and you took my crew, which seems enough. Also you took from me all sense of where I am, which was more than enough to rob me of. May the gods give that there are men somewhere near -- though it seems unlikely. No men of sense would inhabit so unpleasant a coast."

He looked up the beach, which curved away somewhere beyond the rain mists into a gray, formless blank. Down the beach, the high rocky cliff dwindled away just before it, too, was swallowed by the gray, wind-driven mists. Overhead, the dull gray was darkened to night, and the dull gray of his spirits darkened with it.

He followed the line of the cliff speculatively, and looked at the smug, uplifted brow of it near him. There was no sense struggling up here if it fell away to an easy slope half a mile down the beach. He heaved himself up from the boulder and started, annoyed that he had not the faintest idea whether he was moving south, east, north or west. To his sea rover's mind it was a feeling of nakedness equal to the undressed feeling the lack of his sword gave him.

Half a mile and the cliff did give way to a cragged set of natural steps. Above, he found his dizziness returned by the effort of climbing, and the beginnings of a mist-obscured meadow of some wiry grass that thrived on salt-spray. He set off across it doggedly as the gray of the skies gave way to almost total blackness. The wiry grass clutched at his toes, and he felt too weary to lift his feet above it.

Resignedly, he lay down to wait for daylight. Half an hour later, the chilling, dying wind induced him to change "his mind. He stood up again and started on. The wind had swept away the last of the rain mist, and

presently he made out a gleam of light that came and went erratically. He stood still, squinting his eyes, and watched.

"It may be like the pools I saw in the Dryland, a dream of something I want, but again, it may merely be that trees are blowing in front of the light. In any case, it's something other than gray mist to walk toward."

He stopped a hundred yards from the little building and watched more carefully. Strangers were not welcome in most of the world he'd known, but a rough gauge of the way an unknown people received a stranger lay in their buildings. Sticks and wattles -- the stranger was apt to be the dinner. Good timber and thatch -- the stranger was welcomed to dinner, usually roast sheep or lamb. Crude stone -- the stranger was allowed to enter, if he could pay for his dinner. Finished stone -- the stranger was shown the way to the public house.

^It augured ill. The house was built of fieldstone, well mortared. But still -- they'd be less likely to make dinner of him, even though they might not make dinner for him.

He knocked, noting, for all his weariness, that the door was singularly ill-kept. It opened, and Daron paused in measurement of the man who faced him. Six feet and more, Daron stood, but the man before him was four inches more, built long and supple, with an ease and grace of movement that spoke of well-ordered muscles.

But the face eased the sea rover's mind. It was high and narrow but broad above the eyes -- strange eyes -- gray and deep, almost black as they looked out from the warm firelight of the room beyond. The rugged strongly hewn features were keen with intelligence; the eyes and the tiny wrinkles around them deep with a queerly eternal wisdom.

"Your coast, yonder," said Daron, his mouth twisted in a grim smile, "offers poor bedding for a man whose

ship is gone, and the grass of your meadows seem wiry for human gullets. I've naught but my gratitude left to buy me a meal and a night away from the wind, but if that be good value in your land -- "

The face of the native wrinkled in good-humored acquiescence as he opened the door more fully. "It is a depreciated currency, much debased with counterfeit, a strange trouble of our land. But come in, we'll try the worth of yours."

Daron stepped in, and passed his host. Rather quickly he sought a chair made of X members supporting leather bands. It creaked under his weight as he looked up at his host. "My knees have yet to learn their manners, friend, and they seemed unwilling to wait your invitation."

"Sit then. How long have you been without food?"

"Some twenty hours -- since the storm came up. It's not the lack of food, I think, but the too-free drinking of the last five of those hours. Wine has made my knees as unsteady, but I liked the process better."

"I have little here to offer you -- a shepherd's fare. Tordu is some two days' journey away, beyond the Chinur Mountains."

"Hm-m-m . . . then this is some expansive land I've reached. Friend . . . but stay, if I may eat, the questions and the answers both will boil more freely. If you have the bread and cheese of the shepherds I know, they'll serve most excellently to sop this water I've imbibed."

"Sit here and rest, or warm yourself nearer the fire. The wind is dying, but turning colder, too." The tall man moved away,-through a doorway at the far side of the stonewalled room, and Daron's eyes roved over the furnishings.

There were simple things, chairs -- stools of leather straps and wooden X's, some simple, wooden slabs -- a

table of darkened, well-worn oak. Some sense of unease haunted Daron's mind, a feeling of decay about the smoke-grimed stone of the walls not matched by the simple furnishings.

Then his host was back with a stone jug, an oval loaf of bread, and a crumbling mass of well-ripened cheese on an earthenware plate. He set them on the table, as Daron moved over, for the first time observing closely the dress of his host. His clothes were of some blue-green stuff, loosely draped to fall nearly to his leather-sandaled feet, bunched behind his head in a hooded cowl thrown back between the shoulders now.

Daron's quick eyes studied the fingers that set out the food, even as he reached toward it. They were long, slim, supple fingers, and the forearm that stretched from the loose sleeve of the blue-green cloak was muscled magnificently with the ropey, slim, deceptive cords of the swift-actioned man's strength.

Daron's eyes rose to the face of his host. The level, gray eyes looked down into his for a long moment, and Daron shrugged easily and turned back to his food. The eyes had regarded him with honesty of good intent -- and the green-robed man was his host. If he chose to call himself a shepherd within his own house, to a stranger he befriended, that, then was his business.