"S. P. Somtow - The Fallen Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Somtow S. P)

"I want to kill him!"

Again a spectre of a laugh. Billy settled on the dragon's back; it was ridged with soft dunes of snow.
The dragon flapped his wings, not resoundingly, but with a thud like a cellar door slamming shut in
a next-door house.

The dragon said, "You'll never need to cry again, Billy. From now on you will have to save your
grief, your anger, save it for here where it will be of some use. Listen! I am the Snow Dragon, the
last surviving dragon of the fallen country. I survived by purging myself of all that made me dragon:
my fire, my rage, my iridescent, sparkle-flashing scales that gleamed silver in the moon and gold in
the sun. Now sun and moon are gone. And I have waited for a thousand years, so long that I have
lost the capacity to feel any joy at your coming... I, me Snow Dragon, tell you to dry your tears for
the last time. Promise me."

"I promise." Billy found himself acceding, on impulse, without thinking it out. Already his eyes felt
drained. Only the melting snowflakes moistened his cheeks. He felt no motion, but saw the ground
fall from the dragon's claws. They were rising.

They flew through snowstorms into landscapes overcast and lightly puffed with snow. Here and
there the outlines of castles, here and there a spire poking through the whiteness. There were
oceans frosted with vanilla icing. There were cities full of silent people, trudging listlessly, never
pausing to watch the dragon swooping in the sky, never lifting their glazed-dead eyes from the
snow. At times the sky opened, the whip cracked once, twice, thunderclap-swift, raising fresh welts
in the dragon's hide. They flew on; and the Snow Dragon never seemed to notice the Ringmaster's
capricious punishments.

"Do you still want to kill him?" said the dragon. The air streamed past Billy's face, and yet he felt
nothing, as though he carried around him a bubble of utter stillness. "After what you've seen he can
doтАФ"

"Yes! Yes!" Billy cried fiercely. Anger pounded inside him. "I see what I have to do now; I see why
I was brought here!" And he closed his eyes, thinking of the bridge of anger. And again and again
the lightning-whip cracked. Although he didn't feel its wetness he saw he was sitting in a pool of
congealing blood. Dragon's blood. Purple, smoking in the chill air.

I pushed myself into a nice, controlled, professional posture. "I liked your story," I said, noting from
the silence through the window that the forty-five minutes were over.

HOW can he sit there and spin such a haunting web of dreams тАФ I was shivering in my chair. So was Billy,
as though from terrible cold. I thought, He has plucked, out of the septic tank of the human unconscious, an
image of such precision, such startling profundity, an image of the dark country we all carry inside us ... I checked
myself, knowing I was beginning to sound like a pretentious academic paper. Get a grip on yourself.

"Billy," I said, trying to gauge my tone, to show just the right blend of concern and unconcern. His
story cried out for involvement, for belief, the way poetry does even when it lies. But my job was
not to sit back and revel in the mystery and the beauty of his delusions. It was to help him find
reality ... to shatter the crystal goblet with my sledgehammer of platitudes. "I liked it," I repeated-

"It wasn't a story."