"Zach Hughes - Killbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

ready for use, rolled to my back so that I could watch. The lion was silent,
but I caught a glimpse of him as he moved closer. His intentions were
clear. I considered running for it, back up the slope, but he was above me
and I was at a disadvantage.

The game continued for a long, hot, sweaty period during which the
sun moved perceptibly. I listened for sounds from below, for sounds of the
dragon. There was nothing. Only the sun and the buzz of insects and the
loose rock which rolled down toward me just before the lion coughed,
leaped, made his charge, arching high to come down at me from up the
slope, his tawny hide shining against the sky. I loosed my best and most
deadly arrow and reached for the hardax even as he was airborne, and
then he was descending, claws showing from his pads, and my arrow
lodged ineffectively in his haunch.

In that swift and instant moment of action I wondered if my father had
died thus, at the claws and fangs of a lion instead of in a spitting storm of
dragon's teeth. So I was to die, mauled and maimed, food for the lion of
the mountains. But then there was a terrible sound, even as the lion began
his descent, and I saw his body seem to pause in midair and the life run
out of him with blood springing from his head, and then I was rolling to
keep his vast weight from landing atop me and he was beside me, jerking
out his life.

A sound such as I'd never heard before, a wail of ghostly anguish,
high-pitched, whining, came from below. There was a rumble, a hard
clanking sound.

Oh, gods of man.

I took one moment to make sure the lion was dead. He looked intact,
with only his head damaged, pulped, bloody, but the hide excellent with
only the one arrow hole in the flank. I retrieved my arrow and lay beside
the dead animal, admiring his magnificent coloring, the powerful and now
useless muscles, the yellowish and deadly teeth exposed in a death's-head
grin. The sound from below came to a halt.

From directly below there was the bellow of a dragon's voice, and teeth
swept up the slope, making leaves dance and fall and sending a shower of
dust into my eyes as they struck against the rock which protected me.
More frightened than I'd ever been, I waited for the deadly rain to cease. It
was said that very old dragons had long since spit out all their teeth and
had only their deadly eyes. This, then, was not one of them, although all
dragons are ancient.

Silence. I lay there, forcing myself to review everything I'd ever heard
around the campfires on the subject of dragons.

By the will of God, dragons did not breed. God help man if they did. By
the will of God, dragons stayed on their dragon paths, beaten into