"Fritz Leiber - FGM 7 - The Knight and Knave of Swords" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

terminated in a serviceably if somewhat unadjustably clutched bow.

Here near town the heath was grass mingled with ankle-high heather,
here and there dotted with small clumps of gorse, in and out of which the
occasional pair of plump lemmings played fearlessly, and man-high gray
standing stones. These last had perhaps once been of religious significance to
the now atheistical Rime Islers -- who were atheists not in the sense that
they did not believe in gods (that would have been very difficult for any
dweller in the world of Nehwon) but that they did not socialize with any such
gods or hearken in any way to their commands, threats, and cajolings. They
(the standing stones) stood about like so many mute gray grizzle bears.

Except for a few compact white clouds a-hang over the isle, the late
afternoon sky was clear, windless, and surprisingly balmy for this late in
autumn, in fact on the very edge of winter and its icy, snow-laden winds.

The girl accompanied Fafhrd in his practicing. The silver-blond
thirteen-year-old now trudged about with him collecting arrows -- half of them
transfixing his target, which was a huge ball. To keep his bow out of the way
Fafhrd carried it as if over his shoulder, maimed left arm closely bent
upward.

"They ought to have an arrow that would shoot around corners," Gale
said apropos of hunting behind a standing stone. "That way you'd get your
enemy if he hid behind a house or a tree trunk."

"It's an idea," Fafhrd admitted.

"Maybe if the arrow had a little curve in it -- " she speculated.

"No, then it would just tumble," he told her. "The virtue of an arrow
lies in its perfect straightness, its -- "

"You don't have to tell me that," she interrupted impatiently. "I keep
hearing all about that, over and over, from Aunt Afreyt and cousin Cif when
they lecture me about the Golden Arrow of Truth and the Golden Circles of
Unity and all those." The girl was referring to the closely guarded gold ikons
that had been from time immemorial the atheist-holy relics of the Rime Isle
fisherfolk.

That made Fafhrd think of the Golden Cube of Square Dealing, forever
lost when the Mouser had hurled it to quell the vast whirlpool which had
vanquished the Mingol fleet and threatened to sink his own in the great sea
battle. Did it lie now in mucky black sea bottom near the Beach of Bleached
Bones, or had it indeed vanished entire from Nehwon-world with the errant
gods, Odin and Loki?

And that in turn made him wonder and worry a little about the Gray
Mouser, who had sailed away a month ago in _Seahawk_ on a trading expedition
to No-Ombrulsk with half his thieves and _Flotsam_'s Mingol crew and Fafhrd's