"Lumley,.Brian.-.Titus.Crow.2.-.Transition.Of.Titus.Crow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

Slowly the scanners dimmed. All my connections with the time-clock were breaking now, each joining thread parting. Now I was simply a man in a box, alone in the deepening darkness.
My last glimpse of Elysia before the scanners went completely blank was of the blue mountain spires, much closer now, lifting up to pierce cotton clouds. Then the darkness was complete and I was journeying blindly toward an unknown destiny in an alien, beautiful world.
After some little time I felt the slightest jolt as the clock came to a halt, and almost immediately the door before me swung open on a corridor that stretched away into softly silver distances. A corridor lined with . . . with time-clocks, just like my own!
No, not quite like mine. Certainly they were machines governed by a similar principle - the clocklike faces with their strangely erratic, twin-paired hands and curious hieroglyphs were ample proof of that. But these machines, the majority of them at least, were designed for forms other than those of men. There were some identical in every respect to that clock of mine, which I had mistakenly believed to be unique, but of the rest. . .
There were machines of silver and gold, others of glass or crystal, some of stone or at least of a material indistinguishable from stone, and at least one of a delicate bronze wire mesh. Some were quite tiny, no more than seven or eight inches in height; others were wide and tall, towering a fantastic thirty feet or more toward the glowing ceiling of the vast corridor. I could not help but wonder what sort of creatures might have need of these latter machines.
Then, as I gazed along the corridor of clocks, I saw that

I was not alone. Moving toward me strode a plumed, bird-headed being whose saucer eyes regarded me with an ancient intelligence. Costumed in a cloak of gold and wearing padlike sandals of golden mesh on his clawed bird feet, he drew close and paused to address me in softly clucking, inquiring tones in answer to which I could only shake my head. Rapidly then and with many a gesture the bird-man tried several different tongues on me, all without avail. His demeanor, despite his utterly alien aspect, was the very soul of polite friendliness. Eventually, after listening to a long sequence of hissing cachinnations, I said, 'It's no use. I'm afraid I don't understand a word you're saying.'
'Ah!' he replied at once. 'Then you'll be the Earthman Tiania is expecting. Stupid of me, I should have known at once, but it's been a long, long time since a man of Earth was here in Elysia. Let me introduce myself. I am Esch, Master Linguist of the Dchichis and adept in all known tongues, including the electric hum of the D'horna-ahn Energies. Whenever I meet up with a stranger I take the opportunity to practice my art. Right now, though, I am off to Atha-Atha VII to learn the language of the sea-sloth. Perhaps we'll meet again. Do excuse me.'
He turned to a globular clock whose base resembled, not surprisingly, the woven bowl of a metal nest and was about to enter when, as if on an afterthought, he turned and added, 'Oh, but I almost forgot. A lithard is waiting for you outside, sent by Tiania.'
'A lithard? Outside?' I answered uncertainly, staring about me. 'Thank you.' I began to take a tentative step in the direction from which the bird-man had approached.
'No; no, no!' he called out. 'I walk only for the exercise. You have no need of exercise.' He quite openly admired my muscular torso, then cocked his head on one side and gave a piercing whistle from his ridged beak. 'There we

are. Now just you wait a moment and your lithard will come for you.'
'But -'
'Auf Wiedersehen! Au revoir! Saph-ess isaph!' he chirruped, waving a vestigial wing and entering into the nest-shaped clock. The machine immediately faded and disappeared from view.
Again I was alone in the corridor of clocks, but not for long. At first the sound was a mere - susurration, a murmur as of small winds or the sound of a distant ocean in a conch's sounding coil, but in a twinkling it grew to a regular throbbing, a beating of great wings. My lithard was coming for me!
To my left the corridor stretched into softly silvery distances as before; to my right a mote danced afar in the air between the glowing ceiling and the floor of the corridor, passing above the receding rows of space-time machines. Rapidly the mote grew to a shape, a winged outline preceded by outstretched head and neck. Just as quickly I began to feel the air stir on my cheek as the dragon - for the moment I could only think of the creature as such - flew toward me with a majestic beating of its great wings. A moment more and it alighted before me on the floor of the corridor, a living fragment from one of Earth's oldest mythologies. Here was the green and golden dragon of the Tung-gat tapestries, a beast such as might play in the Gardens of Rak! There it stood, Tyrannosaurus rex with leather wings and serpentine neck, a draco out of the Asian hinterlands but magnified many times over, and all of a natural green and gilt iridescence. It was harnessed in black leather where neck joined body with a saddle of hammered silver and reins of spun gold!
The massive lizard head towered high above me while huge eyes observed me, then a great rear leg bent to

lower the creature's bulk, forming two scaly steps each half the height of a man. Amazingly, with a dull rumble, the creature spoke: Tituth, Tituth Crow! Tiania ith
waiting.'
A lisping lizard! A ... lithard! Could this possibly be the source of the naming of such creatures? I doubted it, but laughed nevertheless at the thought. There was no malice in my laugh, however, and as if it knew my thoughts the huge beast before me laughed too, throwing its head back on its scaled neck and booming until I thought the high ceiling must surely come down on us
both.
When the creature was quiet I reached up and patted its great head, gazing in wonder into the huge black eyes. For a moment longer we studied one another, man and dragon, and then the lithard began again: 'Tiania ith -'
'I know, I know!' I cried. 'She's waiting for me.' Then, with all my senses dizzy and rushing, almost as if I was half drunk on the wine of pure joy, I put all other thoughts aside but those of the goddess. Leaping on my mount's knee, and from there to the ridged back where I swung easily into the saddle, I cried: 'Lead on, my scaly friend!'
The great head turned to regard me more soberly. 'Thcaly friend named Oth-Neth!'
'Bravo, Oth-Neth!' I slapped the great neck. 'Now take me to your mistress.' And mountain of flesh that he was, he stretched his great wings and we lifted up, impossibly light as a feather, and I gripped the reins hard as the corridor of clocks began to speed by beneath me ...
The corridor of clocks stretched away and away, but before long Oth-Neth turned and flew into a side shaft that rose at about thirty degrees and at right angles away from the silvery main corridor until it emerged from the subterranean place into daylight. I had not been dreaming

when I flew the time-clock - or rather when it flew me -over the fields and aerial roads and cities of faerie Elysia. The same fantastic view now spread below me as before. Behind us were the blue mountains, in the heart of which lay the corridor of clocks, and before us the vast and splendid landscape of a world of opium dreams! A fragrant wind whipped my hair and lifted my soul to heights rarely if ever experienced before.
A sudden thought came to me and I stood up in my saddle to stretch myself out along the ridged neck of my mount. I shouted into one of Oth-Neth's tiny ears: 'Oth-Neth, I fear I'm hardly in any fit state for audience with Tiania!'
My hair was long and unkempt; my beard was wild and uneven; my naked body, while brown from the rays of several suns, was not nearly as clean as I would have liked it. Oth-Neth turned his head slightly and rolled back a great eye. 'Do you with to bathe?' He wrinkled a nostril. 'You thmelly?'
'Yes, I think I am rather . . . smelly, and I would love to bathe,' I answered him, somewhat abashed at his more or less accurate perceptions. 'And perhaps clothes . . .?'
But now the dragon seemed uncertain. The beat of his wings became fractionally less steady, then stilled completely as he drew them back and fell forward into a breathtaking, gliding swoop.
'You would bathe . . . thoon?' he asked. 'Before we get to houthhold of Tiania?'
'Yes, before we get to the household of Tiania,' I answered.
"Then there ith only . . . lithard pool. If that will do, I altho bathe. Later . . . bring you robeth.'
'That will do very nicely,' I told him, wondering what, exactly, the lithard pool could be but not wanting to appear ignorant.

'Good!' he seemed greatly relieved. He turned one wing into the wind, pulled his head up and transformed his dive into a circling, soaring climb that took us up, up to the cotton clouds and through them. Then he turned his head slightly to ask inquiringly: 'Do you fear ... the high platheth?'
'No, I'm firm enough in the saddle.'
'And do you like ... thpeed?'
I thrilled to the idea of riding a speeding dragon through the skies of an unknown world. 'I love speed!'
He blinked his great eyes. 'Tiania, too, like fly ... fatht!' And with that his wings stretched out and back, doubling the speed of their beating in a moment. In but another moment we were caught up in a thermal current that whipped us faster and faster along dizzy paths of upper air in a thrilling, nerve-tingling ride that I wished might go on forever!
All too soon, however, it was over. Then we plunged down, down through the clouds and between the higher spires of a scarlet city, then down again toward a distant glittering blue patch in fields of green. The patch soon became a lake - the lithard pool.
Young dragons splashed in the shallows of glittering waters under the watchful eyes of warty matrons, while farther out more mature creatures raced above and below the surface, to and fro, with wings folded back almost in the manner of Earth's penguins. Occasionally they would leap up from depths near the center of the lake to burst fully into view in rainbow cascades of water that caught the warm sunlight and scattered it. Then they would spread their wings to climb high before plummeting again to the cool pool below. This then was the lithard pool, a lake of sporting dragons!
We settled in the shallows where Oth-Neth put down his great hind legs and spread his wings across the surface

of the pool. All the younger lithards backed away to stand watching us. Their eyes were saucer-wide and, among the very young ones, a little frightened. In a matter of seconds all the excited activity of the pool had died down and all lithard eyes were upon us. Only the matrons politely turned their backs on my nakedness.