"Arthur H. Landis - Camelot in Orbit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Arthur H)

Camelot in Orbit

by

Arthur H. Landis

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

The red-gold orb of mighty Fomalhaut I blazed for brief seconds through a wind-blown rift in
the lowering snow clouds. The effect was prismatic, causing hoar frost on granite walls,
crenellated turrets, and even the bulk of great Castle Glagmaron to sparkle with a myriad of
colors. The bridge to the castle gates, now rimed and hung with icicles, glowed too with an
iridescence similar to Terra's mythical "Bifrost Bridge"-that beauteous link 'twixt the world of
men and mighty Asgaard.

All very poetic, if viewed from the comfort of a hovering spacecraft. But I wasn't in a
hovering spacecraft. Indeed, I was seated on a wooden stool next to a wooden table, 'neath
a most incongruous draping of weathered, purple canvas- my pavilion....

Paradoxically, I was in full armor while dripping sweat in a surrounding temperature of
five degrees Fahrenheit. I had just completed a series of jousting runs, thus the sweat. It was
mid-winter on Fregis, Fomalhaut's second planet, thus the temperature. The place was the
martial training field to the east of Glagmaron Castle in the country of Marack, most powerful
of the five kingdoms of the northern continent of Marack.

The stool whereon I sat was next to that of my shield-companion Sir Rawl Fergis,
nephew to Marack's Queen Tindil. Student squires were unlacing our plates. To the
Fregisian eye we were alike as two peas in a pod; each of us weighing in at about
one-ninety, and with a height of 6'l". But the likeness ended there. For whereas Rawl's fur
was auburn and real, mine was jet-black and of a gene-cultured origin. Rawl's eyes were
purple-blue; all Fregisians' eyes were purple-blue. Mine were brown, beneath purple-blue
contacts. Lastly, I had twice the strength he had, since I came from a planet with twice the
mass. An important factor, too, in a world of mayhem, was that an imposed neural
preconditioning, infused during the hours of sleep prior to planetfall, had made me a master
of all Fregisian weaponry.

Even the beauteous stones of my swordbelt were not just "stones." They were a link
to certain death-dealing laser beams, were I granted the power to use them, and to various
other "things," including a communications potential with the starship Deneb-3, now,
hopefully, orbiting Fregis.

I reached for the pitcher of sviss which but short minutes before had been gog-milk,
changed now by my companion's shouted "words." Rawl once confessed to me that he'd
learned but three things of magick at Glagmaron City's Collegium: the thing of the sviss,
skilled lute playing, and a spell for love-to be used three times only. He'd used all three on
the Lady Caroween, daughter to the Lord Breen Hoggle Fitz; wasted them actually, since I'd
been told later that Caroween would have used the three she had on him.

Snow lay in drifts upon the ground, sailed lazily through the air in puffs and swirls from
fat pummeled clouds; all pushed in our direction by a cold wind. I sampled the sviss, rolled