"Lafferty, R A - Among the Hairy Earthmen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

transcendent races running wild on an ocean beach for an
afternoon, they ran wild over continents. They scattered. And
they took whatever forms first came into their minds.
Hobbledark and smoldering like crippled Vulcan.
Michael Goodgrinda broken-nosed bull of a man. How
they all howled when he invented that first form!
Ralphalike young Mercury.
And Lonniea tail giant with a golden beard.
Laurie was fire, Bea was light, Joan was moon-darkness.
But in these, or in any other forms they took, you'd always
know that they were cousins or brethren.
. Lonnie went pure Gothic. He had come onto it at the tail
end of the thing and he fell in love with it.
"I am the Emperor!" he told the people like giant thunder.
He pushed the Emperor Wenceslas off the throne and became
Emperor.
"I am the true son of Charles, and you had thought me
dead," he told the people. "I am Sigismund." Sigismund was
really dead, but Lonnie became Sigismund and reigned, taking
the wife and all the castles of Wenceslas. He grabbed off
gangling old forts and mountain-rooks and raised howling
Eretzi armies to make war. He made new castles. He loved
the tall sweeping things and raised them to a new height. Have
you never wondered that the last of those castlesin the late
afternoon of the Gothicwere the tallest and oddest?
One day the deposed Wenceslas came back, and he was
possessed of a new power.
"Now we will see who is the real Emperor!" the new
Wenceslas cried like a rising storm.
They clashed their two forces and broke down each other's
bridges and towns and stole the high ladies from each other's
strongholds. They wrestled like boys. But they wrestled with a
continent.
Lonnie (who was Sigismund) learned that the Wenceslas he
battled was Michael Goodgrind wearing a contrived Emperor
body. So they fought harder.
There came a new man out of an old royal line.
"I am Jobst," the new man cried. "I will show you two
princelings who is the real Emperor!"
He fought the two of them with overwhelming verve. He
raised fast-striking Eretzi armies, and used tricks that only a
young Mercury would know. He was Ralpha, entering the
game as the third Emperor. But the two combined against
him and broke him at Constance.
They smashed Germany and France and Italy like a clutch
of eggs. Never had there been such spirited conflict. The
Eretzi were amazed by it all, but they were swept into it; it
was the Eretzi who made up the armies.
Even today the Eretzi or Earthers haven't the details of it
right in their histories. When the King of Aragon, for an