"Robert E. Howard - Conan - Vale of Lost Women" - читать интересную книгу автора (Howard Robert E)

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THE VALE OF LOST WOMEN
A Conan Story
by Robert E. Howard

The thunder of the drums and the great elephant-tusk horns was deafening, but in Livia's ears
the clamor seemed but a confused muttering dull and far away. As she lay on the angareb in the
great hut, her state bordered between delirium and semi-unconsciousness. Outward sounds and
movements scarcely impinged upon her senses. Her whole mental vision, though dazed and chaotic,
was yet centered with hideous certitude on the naked, writhing figure of her brother, blood
streaming down his quivering thighs. Against a dim nightmare background of dusky interweaving
shapes and shadows, that white form was limned in merciless and awful clarity. The air seemed
still to pulsate with an agonized screaming, mingled and interwoven obscenely with a rustle of
fiendish laughter.
She was not conscious of sensation as an individual, separate and distinct from the rest of
the cosmos. She was drowned in a great gulf of pain - was herself but pain crystalized and
manifested in flesh. So she lay without conscious thought or motion, while outside the drums
bellowed, the horns clamored, and barbaric voices lifted hideous chants, keeping time to naked
feet slapping the hard earth and open palms smiting one another softly.
But through her frozen mentality individual consciousness at last began to seep. A dull
wonder that she was still bodily unharmed first made itself manifest. She accepted the miracle
without thanksgiving. The matter seemed meaningless. Acting mechanically, she sat up on the
angareb and stared dully about her. Her extremities made feeble beginnings of motions, as if
responding to blindly awakening nerve centers. Her naked feet scruffed nervously at the hard-
beaten dirt floor. Her fingers twitched convulsively at the skirt of the scanty undertunic which
constituted her only garment. Impersonally she remembered that once, it seemed long, long ago,
rude hands had torn her other garments from her body, and she had wept with fright and shame. It
seemed strange, now, that so small a wrong should have caused her so much woe. The magnitude of
outrage and indignity was only relative, after all, like everything else.
The hut door opened, and a black woman entered - a lithe pantherish creature, whose supple
body gleamed like polished ebony, adorned only by a wisp of silk twisted about her strutting
loins. The white of her eyeballs reflected the firelight outside, as she rolled them with wicked
meaning.
She bore a bamboo dish of food - smoking meat, roasted yams, mealies, unwieldy ingots of
native bread - and a vessel of hammered gold, filled with yarati beer. These she set down on the
angareb, but Livia paid no heed; she sat staring dully at the opposite wall, hung with mats woven
of bamboo shoots. The young black woman laughed evilly, with a flash of dark eyes and white teeth,
and with a hiss of spiteful obscenity and a mocking caress that was more gross than her language,
she turned and swaggered out of the hut, expressing more taunting insolence with the motions of
her hips than any civilized woman could with spoken insults.
Neither the wench's words nor her actions had stirred the surface of Livia's consciousness.
All her sensations were still turned inward. Still the vividness of her mental pictures made the
visible world seem like an unreal panorama of ghosts and shadows. Mechanically she ate the food
and drank the liquor without tasting either.
It was still mechanically that at last she rose and walked unsteadily across the hut, to peer
out through a crack between the bamboos. It was an abrupt change in the timbre of the drums and
horns that reacted upon some obscure part of her mind and made her seek the cause, without
sensible volition.
At first she could make out nothing of what she saw; all was chaotic and shadowy, shapes