"Melanie Rawn - Exiles 1 - The Ruins of Ambrai" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rawn Melanie)

pornography than anyone should have to endure in four lifetimes.

Collan knew the poems were dreadful because Minstrel's instinct told him so. He knew the
history was untrue because Taguare had let him read secret copies of treatises from the time
before the First Councillor. (Besides, one of Scraller's own books had Avira Anniyas winning
the Battle of Domburron and killing Warrior Mage Lirsa Bekke with her own hands, and
everyone knew the two events had occurred on the same day a thousand miles apart.)

The pornography simply nauseated him. Scraller, however, found it vastly romantic. He
would slump back in his chair, tears of enjoyment trickling fat and slow down his cheeks as
the Humble Whomever yielded his tense and trembling virginity to the erotic mastery of the
Blooded Lady Thus-and-so, who then proceeded to fuck him blind. Such forthright terms
were never used, however; Scraller preferred his titillations couched in coy and cloying
euphemisms. He savored descriptive metaphor: "burning monolith of manhood" and "fierce
craving cavern of womanly desire" brought gusting sighs of sensuous delight. He adored
scenes of bondage, but only if silken cords were specified. The word "rape" made him scowl
horriblyтАФeven if it was obvious that rape was precisely what the story was about. By the fifth
night of reading this offal, Col knew that if he vocalized the Humble Whomever's
impassioned grunts and the Blooded Lady Thus-and-so's litany of
You'll-love-what-I'm-going-to-do-to-you-you-handsome-peasant-brute one more time, he'd
vomit.

But he learned how to keep saying the words with the feeling Scraller deemed appropriate,
while his mind disconnected and roamed elsewhere.

Scraller's evening entertainment might have given him a warped view of sex. That it did not
was due to his own good sense and his observations in Quarters. Slaves were forbidden
marriage, but they could bedshare with whomever they pleased. Collan learned that such
activities sometimes occasioned soft laughter, sometimes muffled weeping, and occasionally
bruises. But the persons he liked and respected, whichever sex they bedded, were always
attended to their blankets by laughter. Nobody in Scraller's books ever laughed, except in
virile triumph or cruel mockeryтАФor perhaps it was cruel triumph and virile mockery, he'd
stopped paying attention long since.

Truly told, he came to feel rather sorry for Scraller. Forbidden by a sense of his own exalted
worth from besmirching himself with slave women, adamantly refusing to marry and thus
put his wealth into a woman's hands, he had two choices: his female guests, if they felt so
inclined, and his books.

It was years before Col actually tagged those books with the term pornography , and others
would have blinked in surprise at what he considered obsceneтАФmild indeed by some
standards. But Col never reversed his opinion of Scraller's bedtime stories, for later experience
taught him that bedding was obscene unless he lay down with a woman's glad laughter as
well as the woman herself.

Love was something he wouldn't understand until he was past thirty years old, and the irony
of it was that he was the Humble Whomever, and she was the Blooded Lady Thus-and-So.
But oh, how they laughedтАж

Once she stopped wanting to murder him.