"Kushner,.Donn.-.A.Book.DragonUC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

on reaching their full growth, to fly around the British Isles.
They had done so before the Normans came, before the Vikings,

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and the Romans, and the Picts; back to the happy times when
there were no people at all. In those days, his grandmother
told him, the dragons had quite justifiably regarded all the land
as their own. Swarms of them would fly along the coastline,
soaring above the cliffs of Cornwall, skimming the angry waves
of the Irish Sea, circling round each rocky island, seeing few
other signs of life than their own wide wings.

But now, his grandmother said, dragons flew alone and
were rarely out of the sight of man.

So Nonesuch had found it. On rocky mountains and in
dark valleys he always sniffed the smoke of peat fires, sure
signs of human life. When he swooped down to catch a deer,
he realized it was already being pursued by hounds and
horsemen.

He considered flying farther out to sea to seek new lands
until he found one with no trace of humans, but the thought of
his family in the cavern drew him back. On his return, he
learned all the details of his father's death.

"My son was worse than his father!" his grandmother
lamented. "True, everyone has to eat, but to make such a
production of it is worse than foolishness: it borders on
stupidity!"

This was the last complete sentence Nonesuch heard his
grandmother speak. She lapsed into her reveries again. Her
rare words were disjointed. Sometimes "turtles and toads"
again, which caused Nonesuch an unaccountable twinge. Or,
with disgust, "the two-legged ones," by which she meant
humans. Or, with a more comfortable sigh, "the warm, liquid
rock," which at the time made no sense at all.

But for a time, Nonesuch was so immersed in his own
thoughts that he hardly noticed his grandmother's silence. He
was beginning to understand that strength and size, and even

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skill, were not enough, so long as humans existed in the
world. It was bitter to think this just when he was reaching his
prime; and at first he tried to put the idea away. Sometimes
Nonesuch would zoom around furiously, just over the tops of