"David Drake - Men Like Us (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

and a
pair of lanterns hung from the roof joists. Deer and elk antlers were pegged to the pine paneling all
around the room, and above the mantelpiece glowered the skull of a rat larger than a German shepherd.
"I wonder that a man has the courage to walk alone out there," suggested a heavy-set local who tamped
his pipe with the ball of his thumb, "what with the muties and all."
Smith chuckled, swigged his beer, and gestured with the mug at the rat skull. "Like that, you mean? But
that's old. The giant rats were nasty enough, I have no doubt, but they weren't any stronger than the
wolves, and they were a good deal stupider. Maybe you'd find a colony now and again in ruins
downwind of a Strike, but they'll not venture far into the light, and the ones that're left-not many-are
nothing that a slingstone or arrow can't cure if needs be." He paused and smiled. "Besides, their meat's
sweet enough, I'm told."
Despite the fire, the other faces in the circle went pale. Smith's eyes registered the reaction while he
continued to smile. "Now travelers tell stories, you know," he said, "and there's an art to listening to them.
There's little enough to joke about on the trail. So I have to do it here."
His face went serious for a moment, and he added, "But I'll tell you this and swear to the truth of it When
I was near what may have been Cleveland, I thought I'd caught a mouse rummaging in my pack. And
when I fetched it out, it was no bigger than a mouse, and its legs were folded under it so it could hop and
scurry the way a mouse can. But its head-there was a horn just there"-the traveler touched the tip of his
nose-"and another littler one just behind it. I figure some zoo keeper before the Blast would have called
me a liar if I'd told him what his rhinos would breed to, don't you think?"
He drank deep. The company buzzed at the wonder and
the easy fellowship of the man who had seen it.
"Scottie meant the half-men, didn't you, Scottie?" said a bulky man whose mustache and the beard
fringing his mouth were dark with beer. He mimed an extra head with his clenched fist. "Monsters like
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that in the Hot Lands."
Smith's head bobbed sagely against the chorus of grim assent from the other men. "Sure, I know what
you mean," he said. "Two-headed men? Girls with an extra pair of legs coming out of their bellies?"
Sounds of horror and agreement.
"You see," the traveler went on, "the Blast changed things, but you know as well as I do that it didn't
change them to be easier for men. There've always been children born as . . . monsters, if you will.
Maybe more born nowadays than there were before the Blast, but they were born, and I've seen books
that were old at the Blast that talk of them. And they don't live now, my friends. Life everywhere is too
hard, and those poor innocents remind folk of the Blast, and who would remember that?"
He looked around the room. The eyes that met his dropped swiftly. "There's been some born here in
Moseby, haven't there?" Smith asked, his words thrusting like knife blades and no doubt in them. "Where
are they now?"
The man they had called Scottie bit through the reed stem of his pipe. He spluttered, and the front legs of
his stool clacked on the puncheon floor.
"Say, now, I'm not here to pry," Smith continued swiftly. "What you do is your own business. For my
own part, I'd appreciate another mug of this excellent beer."
Chairs scraped in agreement as all the men stood, stretched, and moved to the bar. Modell drew beer
smoothly, chalking drinks on the board on the back wall everyone but Smith was a local. The innkeeper
even broached a new cask without noticeable delay. Several of
the company went out by the rear door and returned, lacing their trousers. There was a brief pause as
everyone settled back around the fire. Then Scottie swallowed, scowled, and said belligerently, "All right,