"M. John Harrison - Viriconium 1 - The Pastel City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

the Great Brown Waste of the North.
The wealth of its people lay entirely in
salvage. They possessed no science, but scavenged
the deserts of rust that had been originally the
industrial complexes of the last of the Afternoon
Cultures: and since the largest deposits of metal
and machinery and ancient weapons lay in the
Great Brown Waste, the Northern Tribes held
them. Their loose empire had twin hubs, Glenluce
and Drunmore, bleak sprawling townships where
intricate and beautiful machines of unknown
function were processed crudely into swords and
tribal chieftains fought drunkenly over possession
of the deadly baans unearthed from the desert.
They were fierce and jealous. Their rule of the
Southerners was unkind, and, eventually,
insupportable.
The destruction of this pre-Viriconium culture,
and the wresting of power from the Northmen
was accomplished by Borring-Na-Lecht, son of a
herdsman of the Monar Mountains, who gathered
the Southerners, stiffened their spines with his
rural but powerful rhetoric, and in a single week
gutted both Drunmore and Glenluce.
He was a hero. During his lifetime, he united
the tribes, drove the Northmen into the mountains
and tundra beyond Glenluce and built the
city-fortress of Duirinish on the edge of the
Metal-salt Marsh where rusts and chemicals
weather-washed from the Great Brown Waste
collected in bogs and poisonous fens and drained
into the sea. Thus, he closed the Low Leedale
against the remnants of the Northern regime,
protecting the growing Southern cities of
Soubridge and Lendalfoot.
But his greatest feat was the renovation of
Viriconium, hub of the last of the Afternoon
Cultures, and he took it for his capital тАФ building
where necessary, opening the time-choked
thoroughfares, adding artifacts and works of art
from the rust deserts, until the city glowed almost
as it had done half a millennium before. From it,
the empire took its name. Borring was a hero.
No other hero came until Methven. During the
centuries after Borring's death, Viriconium
consolidated, grew plump and rich, concerned
itself with wealth, internal trade and minor
political hagglings. What had begun well, in fire
and blood and triumph, lost its spirit.
 For four hundred years the empire sat still