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

preferred it to their husbands' occasional piratings, which took those lusty
men far down the eastern coasts of the Outer Sea, out of reach of immediate
matriarchal supervision and even, the women sometimes feared, of their potent
female magic. Cold Corner was the farthest south ever got by the entire Snow
Clan, whose members spent most of their lives on the Cold Waste and among the
foothills of the untopped Mountains of the Giants and the even more northerly
Bones of the Old Ones, and so this midwinter camp was their one yearly chance
to trade peaceably with venturesome Mingols, Sarheenmarts, Lankhmarts, and
even an occasional Eastern desert-man, heavily beturbaned, bundled up to the
eyes, and elephantinely gloved and booted.

MARCADOR 1
Nor was it the guzzling which the women opposed. Their husbands were
great quaffers of mead and ale at all times and even of the native white snow-
potato brandy, a headier drink than most of the wines and boozes the traders
hopefully dispensed.
No, what the Snow Women hated so venomously and which each year caused
them to wage cold war with hardly any material or magical holds barred, was
the theatrical show which inevitably came shivering north with the traders,
its daring troupers with faces chapped and legs chilblained, but hearts a-beat
for soft northern gold and easy if rampageous audiences -- a show so
blasphemous and obscene that the men preempted Godshall for its performance
(God being unshockable) and refused to let the women and youths view it; a
show whose actors were, according to the women, solely dirty old men and even
dirtier scrawny southern girls, as loose in their morals as in the lacing of
their skimpy garments, when they went clothed at all. It did not occur to the
Snow Women that a scrawny wench, her dirty nakedness all blue goosebumps in
the chill of drafty Godshall, would hardly be an object of erotic appeal,
besides her risking permanent all-over frostbite.
So the Snow Women each midwinter hissed and magicked and sneaked and
sniped with their crusty snowballs at huge men retreating with pomp, and
frequently caught an old or crippled or foolish, young, drunken husband and
beat him soundly.
This outwardly comic combat had sinister undertones. Particularly when
working all together, the Snow Women were reputed to wield mighty magics,
particularly through the element of cold and its consequences: slipperiness,
the sudden freezing of flesh, the gluing of skin to metal, the frangibility of
objects, the menacing mass of snow-laden trees and branches, and the vastly
greater mass of avalanches. And there was no man wholly unafraid of the
hypnotic power in their ice-blue eyes.
Each Snow Woman, usually with the aid of the rest, worked to maintain
absolute control of her man, though leaving him seemingly free, and it was
whispered that recalcitrant husbands had been injured and even slain,
generally by some frigid instrumentality. While at the same time witchy
cliques and individual sorceresses played against each other a power game in
which the brawniest and boldest of men, even chiefs and priests, were but
counters.
During the fortnight of trading and the two days of the Show, hags and
great strapping girls guarded the Tent of the Women at all quarters, while
from within came strong perfumes, stenches, flashes and intermittent glows by