"Elizabeth Moon - Fool's Gold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

more than the former. He ate their sheep, and then their cattle (having grown large
enough), and once inhaled an entire flock of geeseтАФa mistake, he discovered, as burning
feathers stank abominably. He could not quite bring himself to eat their children, though
his draconish nature found them appetizing, because he knew too well how dirty they
really were, and how disgusting the amulets their mothers tied round their filthy necks.
But he did kill a few of the adults, when they marched out with torches to test the
strength of his fire. He couldn't stomach their stringy, bitter flesh.


Finally they moved away, cursing each other for fools, and Cavernous reigned over a
ruined district. He pried up every hearthstone, and rooted in every well, but few were the
coins or baubles which the villagers left behind.


Although the ignorant assert that the man-drake has powers greater than the dragonborn,
this is but wishful thinking. Dragons born from the egg inherit all the ancient wisdom and
power of dragonkind. Man-drakes are but feeble imitations, capable of matching true
dragons only in their lust for gold. So poor Cavernous Dire, though fearsome to men, had
not a chance of surviving in any contest with real dragonsтАФand real dragons find few
things so amusing as tormenting man-drakes.


'Tis said that every man has some woman who loves himтАФat least until she dies of his
misuseтАФand so it was with Cavernous. Though most of the children born into his very
dysfunctional birth-family had died of abuse or neglect, he had a sister, Bilious Dire, who
had not died, but livedтАФand lived, moreover, with the twisted memory that Cavernous
had once saved her life. (In fact, he had merely pushed her out of his way on one of the
many occasions when his mother Savage came after him with a hot ladle.) But Bilious
built her life, as do we all, on the foundation of her beliefs about reality, and in her reality
Cavernous was a noble being.
She had been long away, Bilious, enriching the man who owned her, but at last she grew
too wrinkled and stiff, and he cast her out. So she returned to the foothills village of her
childhood, to find it ruined and empty, with dragon tracks in the street.


"That horrible dragon," she wailed at the weeping sky. "It's stolen my poor innocent
brother. I must find helpтАФ"
***
"So you see, it's the traditional quest to rescue the innocent victim of a dragon," Mirabel's
sister said. "Our sewing circle has taken on the rehabilitation of the faded blossoms of
viceтАФ" Mirabel mimed gagging, and her sister glared at her. "Don't laugh! It's not
funnyтАФthe poor thingsтАФ"


"Isn't there Madam Aspersia's Residence for them?"


"Madam Aspersia only has room for twenty, and besides she gives preference to women
of a Certain Kind." Mirabel rolled her eyes; her sister combined the desire to talk about
Such Things with the inability to name the Things she wanted to talk about.