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

So it was that when Methven died тАФ some
said partly of the lasting sorrow at Methvel's end
тАФ there were two Queens to pretend to the
throne: Canna Moidart, and Methven's sole heir
Methvet, known in her youth as Jane. And the
knights of the Order of Methven, seeing a strong
empire that had little need of their violent
abilities, confused and saddened by the death of
their King, scattered.
Canna Moidart waited a decade before the
first twist of the knife . . .

Chapter One
tegeus Cromis, sometime soldier and
sophisticate of Viriconium, the Pastel City, who
now dwelt quite alone in a tower by the sea and
imagined himself a better poet than swordsman,
stood at early morning on the sand-dunes that lay
between his tall home and the grey line of the
surf. Like swift and tattered scraps of rag, black
gulls sped and fought over his downcast head. It
was a catastrophe that had driven him from his
tower, something that he had witnessed from its
topmost room during the night.
He smelled burning on the offshore wind. In
the distance, faintly, he could hear dull and heavy
explosions: and it was not the powerful sea that
shook the dunes beneath his feet.
Cromis was a tall man, thin and cadaverous.
He had slept little lately, and his green eyes were
tired in the dark sunken hollows above his high,
prominent cheekbones.
He wore a dark green velvet cloak, spun about
him like a cocoon against the wind; a tabard of
antique leather set with iridium studs over a white
kid shirt; tight mazarine velvet trousers and high,
soft boots of pale blue suede. Beneath the heavy
cloak, his slim and deceptively delicate hands
were curled into fists, weighted, as was the
custom of the time, with heavy rings of
nonprecious metals intagliated with involved
cyphers and sphenograms. The right fist rested on
the pommel of his plain long sword, which,
contrary to the fashion of the time, had no name.
Cromis, whose lips were thin and bloodless, was
more possessed by the essential qualities of things
than by their names; concerned with the reality of
Reality, rather than with the names men give it.
He worried more, for instance, about the
beauty of the city that had fallen during the night