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

moving and mingling, writhing and twisting, black formless blocks hewed out starkly against a
setting of blood-red that dulled and glowed. Then actions and objects assumed their proper
proportions, and she made out men and women moving about the fires. The red light glinted on
silver and ivory ornaments; white plumes nodded against the glare; naked black figures strutted
and posed, silhouettes carved out of darkness and limned in crimson.
On an ivory stool, flanked by giants in plumed headpieces and leopardskin girdles, sat a fat,
squat shape, abysmal, repulsive, a toad-like chunk of blackness, reeking of the dank rotting
jungle and the nighted swamps. The creature's pudgy hands rested on the sleek arch of his belly;
his nape was a roll of sooty fat that seemed to thrust his bullet-head forward. His eyes gleamed
in the firelight, like live coals in a dead black stump. Their appalling vitality belied the inert
suggestion of the gross body.
As the girl's gaze rested on that repellant figure her body stiffened and tensed as frantic
life surged through her again. From a mindless automaton, she changed suddenly to a sentient mold


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of live, quivering flesh, stinging and burning. Pain was drowned in hate, so intense it in turn
became pain; she felt hard and brittle, as if her body were turning to steel. She felt her hate
flow almost tangibly out along the line of her vision; so it seemed to her that the object of her
emotion should fall dead from his carven stool because of its force.
But if Bajujh, king of Bakalah, felt any psychic discomfort because of the concentration of
his captive, he did not show it. He continued to cram his frog-like mouth to capacity with
handfuls of mealies scooped up from a vessel held up to him by a kneeling woman, and to stare down
a broad lane which was being formed by the action of his subjects in pressing back on either hand.
Down this lane, walled with sweaty black humanity, Livia vaguely realized some important
personage would come, judging from the strident clamor of drum and horn. And as she watched, one
came.
A column of fighting-men, marching three abreast, advanced toward the ivory stool, a thick
line of waving plumes and glinting spears meandering through the motley crowd. At the head of the
ebon spearmen strode a figure at the sight of which Livia started violently; her heart seemed to
stop, then began to pound again, suffocatingly. Against that dusky background, this man stood out
with vivid distinctness. He was clad like his followers in leopardskin loin-cloth and plumed
headpiece, but he was a white man.
It was not in the manner of a supplicant or a subordinate that he strode up to the ivory
stool, and sudden silence fell over the throng as he halted before the squatting figure. Livia
felt the tenseness, though she only dimly knew what it portended. For a moment Bajujh sat, craning
his short neck upward, like a great frog; then, as if pulled against his will by the other's
steady glare, he shambled up off his stool, and stood grotesquely bobbing his shaven head.
Instantly the tension was broken. A tremendous shout went up from the massed villagers, and
at a gesture from the stranger, his warriors lifted their spears and boomed a salute royale for
King Bajujh. Whoever he was, Livia knew the man must indeed be powerful in that wild land, if
Bajujh of Bakalah rose to greet him. And power meant military prestige - violence was the only
thing respected by those ferocious races.
Thereafter Livia stood with her eyes glued to the crack in the hut wall, watching the white
stranger. His warriors mingled with the Bakalas, dancing, feasting, swigging beer. He himself,
with a few of his chiefs, sat with Bajujh and the headmen of Bakalah, cross-legged on mats,
gorging and guzzling. She saw his hands dipped deep into the cooking-pots with the others, saw his
muzzle thrust into the beer vessel out of which Bajujh also drank. But she noticed, nevertheless,