"Fritz Leiber - FGM 1 - Swords and Deviltry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, there met for the first time those two dubious
heroes and whimsical scoundrels, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fafhrd's origins
were easy to perceive in his near seven-foot height and limber-looking
ranginess, his hammered ornaments and huge longsword: he was clearly a
barbarian from the Cold Waste north even of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep
Mountains. The Mouser's antecedents were more cryptic and hardly to be deduced
from his childlike stature, gray garb, mouseskin hood shadowing flat swart
face, and deceptively dainty rapier; but somewhere about him was the
suggestion of cities and the south, the dark streets and also the sun-drenched
spaces. As the twain eyed each other challengingly through the murky fog lit
indirectly by distant torches, they were already dimly aware that they were
two long-sundered, matching fragments of a greater hero and that each had
found a comrade who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime -- or a
hundred lifetimes -- of adventuring.
No one at that moment could have guessed that the Gray Mouser was once
named Mouse, or that Fafhrd had recently been a youth whose voice was by
training high-pitched, who wore white furs only, and who still slept in his
mother's tent although he was eighteen.
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*II: The Snow Women *
At Cold Corner in midwinter, the women of the Snow Clan were waging a
cold war against the men. They trudged about like ghosts in their whitest
furs, almost invisible against the new-fallen snow, always together in female
groups, silent or at most hissing like angry shades. They avoided Godshall
with its trees for pillars and walls of laced leather and towering pine-needle
roof.
They gathered in the big, oval Tent of the Women, which stood guard in
front of the smaller home tents, for sessions of chanting and ominous moaning
and various silent practices designed to create powerful enchantments that
would tether their husbands' ankles to Cold Corner, tie up their loins, and
give them sniveling, nose-dripping colds, with the threat of the Great Cough
and Winter Fever held in reserve. Any man so unwise as to walk alone by day
was apt to be set upon and snowballed and, if caught, thrashed -- be he even
skald or mighty hunter.
And a snowballing by Snow Clan women was nothing to laugh at. They
threw overarm, it is true, but their muscles for that had been greatly
strengthened by much splitting of firewood, lopping of high branches, and
pounding of hides, including the iron-hard one of the snowy behemoth. And they
sometimes froze their snowballs.
The sinewy, winter-hardened men took all of this with immense dignity,
striding about like kings in their conspicuous black, russet, and rainbow-dyed
ceremonial furs, drinking hugely but with discretion, and trading as shrewdly
as Ilthmarts their bits of amber and ambergris, their snow-diamonds visible
only by night, their glossy animal pelts, and their ice-herbs, in exchange for
woven fabrics, hot spices, blued and browned iron, honey, waxen candles,
firepowders that flared with a colored roar, and other products of the
civilized south. Nevertheless, they made a point of keeping generally in
groups, and there was many a nose a-drip among them.
It was not the trading the women objected to. Their men were good at
that and they -- the women -- were the chief beneficiaries. They greatly