"Roland Green - Conan at the Demon's Gate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Roland)

enough to fear, even if they were not Fish-Eaters.

Conan waited. If the Bamulas were thrusting their hunting parties this deep into

Fish-Eater land, it was worth knowing. It was not worth a fight; only in tales

to amuse children did a single hero defeat a whole tribe. But peaceful oblivion

in the depths of the jungles of the Black Coast would be as much past as Belit,

andтАФ

Three women stepped into the clearing. Each carried a jug on her head and a

basket on one hip, slung from the opposite shoulder. The sling thong was all the

women wore above the waist, and below it they wore only cloths wrapped from hips

to knees. Nor did any of them look the worse for being thus revealed. A

well-formed woman never hurt a man's eye, no matter what hue her skin might be.

The women set down their jugs, unslung their baskets, and placed all of them in
a rough circle in the middle of the clearing. Then they knelt and prostrated

themselves seven times toward the offerings. An earring raw gold dangled from

each woman's left ear, and one them had a ring of ivory and gold in her nose.

They rose, breasts bobbing in a manner that would have made a stone statue stare

wide-eyed, and looked about them. Conan wondered what they were expecting,

awaiting, or perhaps hoping for.

He decided that it was probably not him leaping from his hiding place. He had

yet to meet a woman who warmed readily to a man who began by scaring her out of

her wits.

The vigil lasted, as did the silence. Conan had just noticed that the girl with

the nose ring also had blue feathers woven into her tightly curled hair, when

his instincts warned him of something else.

The silence had lasted too long and grown too complete. The normal din of the

jungle had ceased, and it did that only at the appearance of something unknown