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

brown grass of Salisbury Plain within sight of the pillars of
Stonehenge on summer evenings, picking off the blue-painted
Druids as they whirled in ecstasy among the shadows.

Her memory ranged then to the Continental branch of the
family: to the mighty Feuerschlange, who ruled in the dark
forests of northern Germany. With his tail alone, this fearsome
beast once swept a whole phalanx of steel-clad soldiers into a
small lake. Then he set the lake boiling with his fiery breath
and ate his dinner cooked, picking each soldier out of his steel
shell. Nonesuch's father had seen people do much the same
thing with snails, the grandmother added for the sake of
information, though she disapproved of her son's interest in
human eating habits. (' 'What good can come of it?'' she would
remark.)

And then her mind, which sometimes could not remember
events of the same day, took a great leap backwards. In the
beginning, his grandmother told Nonesuch, dragons had chosen
to separate themselves from the dinosaurs, to whom they
were distantly related, except for being so much more intelligent.

She described that terrible time, millions and millions of
years ago, when a huge stone from the sky struck the earth
and filled the heavens with dust, so that the vegetation which
fed dinosaurs and their prey died, and in time the immense
beasts died too. She told, almost as if she were seeing it now,
how the ancestors of the dragons flew high above the dust

clouds, resting only on the mountain tops, feeding on the
ancestors of sure-footed mountain goats and other such frugal,
hardy creatures. Below them, in the thick murk, the dragons
could hear the plaintive groans of dinosaurs, who seemed
more ready to die than to admit how their world had changed
and seek new food in new places. Occasionally a pterodactyl,
a great winged reptile, would swoop up into the sunlight,
then, confused by so much clarity, descend again into the
dying forests.' "They were so stupid,'' the grandmother said,
wagging her head with a sour, disapproving tone, as if she
were speaking of creatures alive now, not those dead for mil-
lions of years.' 'No true dragon could ever tolerate stupidity.''

"But Grandmother," Nonesuch said respectfully, for he
knew she didn't like to be contradicted, "some of our ances-
tors have done foolish things. You've said so yourself." He
remembered her past stories. "Most of the time," he added.

His grandmother reared back her head and almost rose up
on her legs; her dim eyes glowed fiercely. "Foolish? Yes!
Improvident? More often than not! Never counting the cost! At