"R. A. Lafferty - Melchisedek 03 - Argo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

them towards the top of the ice cliffs. He had spent one day climbing up to
his ice station, and now he would move more rapidly. There had been nothing
wrong at ill. It was just that Argonauts, from the hectic life that they
lead, do often wake up scrambled and with lost bearings. The main whistled
sharply, and the three monkey-like figures came off the tall rigging of the
ice-covercd ship and boned up the slick and frozen cliffs like inverted
cascades. They were wraiths, or at least of a lighter flesh, and they could
climb like ascending lightning. They brought ice axes with them, and they
were cheerful and ready for any assignment.
Reaching the top of the ice cliff, the man took a work order from
the breast of his chlamys and read it. He looked around for what should be
there. The three monkey-like seamen had already discovered it and were
attacking it with their ice axes. It wa a woman frozen in a solid block of
ice.
"No job too big, no job too small," the man said in his laughing
voice. "Sometimes a dozen jobs a day, from saving a lost cat to saving a
lost soul. Oh, this is in the nature of a vacation really, to have been
allowed to spend a night on the high cliffs that I love and to carry over
the rescue into the bright morning. We appreciate these little leisures when
they come to us. And there is probably a reason for drawing her out of the
ice."
The woman was ivory-fair, and her veins as shown through her flesh
and the ice were sky blue. The lids of her closed eyes were also of this
gentle and ghostly blue, as was the web-like flesh between her toes. The man
attacked the encasing pillar of ice as the monkey creatures also were doing.
They hacked and split great hunks out of the pillar and quickly sculptured
it down almost to the woman.
The woman woke up, and her blue eyes darted here and yon, following
the bladed axes. She grinned with her eyes at the magus (the man had already
remembered that he was a magus and he was quite close to remembering his own
name; morning forgetfulness were only temporary things to one piloting the
Ship Itself). The woman grinned with her eyes at the monkey-like creatures
also, and they echoed grins back at her. Her people and theirs had once been
in close league. There would be complete accord throughout this whole
company. The woman seemed to be as near akin to the scampering simians as
she was to the magus himself.
The womann cringed with mock horror whenever the axes came too near
to her, and she grimaced broadly when, now and then, an axe came absolutely
too close and bit her flesh to send out little red gushets on the inside of
the ice. Theese things do happen, however canny is the wielder of the axe.
The woman was probably beautiful, and she was wrapped in the blond skin of a

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female cave-bear. There were primordial and archaic aspects to her
appearance, but both the man and the monkey creatures smiled to show that
they liked her and the way she looked.
"How did you know where I was?" she talked out of the ice when a
crack in the pillar of it allowed her to move her chinless jaw. She spoke