"De Camp, L Sprague - The Great Fetish v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

Marko let himself be led away.

2

Marko Prokopiu sat on a stool in one corner of his cell. He rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists, staring down at the floor in front of him. Outside, the rain slanted grayly past the barred window.
Although to some, solitude is a punishment, Marko was glad that he had no roommate. He wanted nothing but to sit on his stool and wallow in solitary despondency.
Behind his somberly immobile face, his mind was a stew of emotions. One of his minds was proud of him for being a martyr to truth. Another was ashamed of himself for exposing himself to punishment for the sake of a mere theory, which might not even be true. A third told him that all was over, that he might as well kill himself, while a fourth tried to console him with the thought that at least his mother and his wife, Petronela, and his friend Mongamri would remain true to him....
The lock went clank and the door groaned open. Ristoli Vasu, the jailer, said: "Your mother is here to see you, Marko. Come."
Marko silently followed the jailer into the anteroom. There stood little Olga Prokopiu, in her old raincoat of wool impregnated with stupa gum.
"Mother!" he said. He checked an impulse to hug Olga Prokopiu when he saw that she held a cake in her hands.
"Here, Marko," she said. "Don't try to eat it all in one bite." She gave it to him with a sharp look. "Now sit down. I don't want you to fall down when you hear the news."
"What news?" said Marko, alarm stkring in his mind.
"Petronela has run off with that man Mongamri."
Marko's jaw dropped. "What. .. when . .."
"Just an hour or two ago. That's why I came over. I told you no good would come of taking that alien into our house. Either of them. Those Anglonians have no more morals than rabbits."
Marko sat back, waiting for his stunned wits to revive. His mother said sharply:
"Now, don't sniffle. You're a grown man, and it's unseemly to show such emotions. You know what you must do."
Marko glanced around the walls of thick stupa-wood planks. "How?"
"Something will turn up." She glanced at the cake, which Marko's huge hands had badly squashed out of shape.
"Oh," said Marko. He wiped away a fugitive tear and pulled himself together. When not crushed by adversity, he could think as well as the next man. "Tell me what happened."
"After dinner I took my siesta. When I awoke, I called to Petronela to help me with the dishes, and there was no answer, nor yet when I knocked on her door. When I went into your room, there were signs of her having suddenly packed, and on the bureau I found this."
She handed her son a piece of paper, on which Petronela had written, in bad Vizantian:
My dear Marko:
Forgive my leaving you, but I cannot abide such a long wait. I am not well suited to life in Skudra anyway, and you will be happier in the long run with a woman of your own kind.
Farewell, Petronela
Marko read the note through twice, crumpled it, and threw it into a corner of the anteroom with such violence that it bounced halfway back. He said:
"Chet had left too?"
"Yes. I remembered that Komnenu's stage-wagons leave around siesta time. I hurried down Zlatkovi Street to Komnenu's stable and found him just hitching up the paxor to leave for Chef.
"There was no sign of Petronela and Mongamri, so I asked Komnenu if he had seen them. He said yes, they had just gone out on the wagon for Thine, an hour earlier. They seemed very cheerful, laughing and holding hands. Komnenu said he supposed they were going down to Thine to hire some lawyer more skillful than Rigas Lazarevi."
Marko picked up the crumpled sheet of note paper, smoothed it out, and read it again, as if by reading it often enough he could persuade it to change its wording. The note remained the same, and so did the searing spiritual pain that flooded his mind. Finally he said:
"What should I do, Mother?"
"Wait till tonight." She lowered her voice, glancing towards the open door into the jailer's office. "Then eat that cake, and do what seems best to you."
"Thanks. Come again soon."
"I shall see you again sooner than you think. Goodbye, and keep your character up. Your father was a man of much less intelligence than you, but he had character."
Olga Prokopiu gathered her raincoat about her and clumped out, looking too small for the voluminous garment and the heavy peasant boots, but spry for her years.
Marko returned to his cell with the note and the mangled cake. He set the cake down in a corner and himself in the opposite corner. He stared at the cake, biting his lips. He beat his fist against his palm, jumped up to pace the cell, then sat down again. He dug his knuckles into his scalp and pounded his knees with his fists. His lips writhed; his huge hairy hands clenched and unclenched.
At last, unable to control himself any longer, he jumped up with a hoarse animal yell, between a scream and a bellow. He glared at the cake, half tempted to kick or trample itЧanything to work off the volcanic energies rising within him. But he retained sense enough to know he might want it later, and anyway it was his mother's gift. Instead, he caught up the stool and slammed it against the cage bars with such force that he broke off the leg by which he held it.
"Here! Here!" cried Ristoli Vasu, coming at a run. "What are you doing, Marko? Stop at once!"
Marko picked up the remains of the stool ,and continued to batter at the bars until the article was reduced to splinters. Then he leaped up and down on the splinters, stamping them with his boots.
"You shall have no supper!" yelled the jailer.
Marko only screamed at Vasu, rattled the cage door, kicked the walls, and pounded his own head and body with his fists.
"This is undignified!" cried Ristoli Vasu. "Marko, you're acting like a child in a tantrum!"
As these words penetrated Marko's red-hazed mind, the fit left him and he threw himself down on his pallet weeping. That, too, was un-Vizantian, but he did not care. лХ
This, too, passed. Marko sat on the floor, having no more stool. He stared blankly, his mind filled with fantasies of horrible things he would do to Chet Mon-gamri and to Petronela too; only the things he would do to Petronela were not quite so horrible. He still loved her in a way.
He could not understand how such a thing had happened. Being Marko, he had simply not seen the signs of Petronela's increasing dissatisfaction with her life in Skudra, or the mutual interest that flared up between her and Mongamri as soon as the traveler moved in. It would have been hard enough for an alien girl like Petronela to get herself accepted by the Skudrans if she had married the most popular man in town. Having married one of the least popular, she found it quite impossible. To her, social acceptance and activity were of great importance.
Deprived of his supper as punishment for destroying the stool, Marko ate the cake. Nobody, he thought, could make cheese cakes as his mother could. About the third bite, as he half expected, he encountered a file. He looked at the file and then at the window bars, beyond which the rain still fell. A slow smile formed on his broad face.


After midnight, Marko Prokopiu knocked on the window of his mother's bedroom. The old lady got up at once and let him in.
"Good," she said. "I knew my son wouldn't falter when his honor had to be avenged. How will you get to Thine?"