"Michael Swanwick - Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

given or it is nothing."

"You're a bit of a philosopher yourself," Papatragos said. "SayтАФa few of our young ladies might be in
heat. You want me to ask around?"

"My good friend Surplus, perhaps, would avail himself of their kind offers. But not I. Much though I'd
enjoy the act, I'd only feel guilty afterward. It is one of the drawbacks of having a depressive turn of
mind."

So Darger made his farewells, picked up his walking stick, and sauntered back to town. The
conversation had given him much to think about.

"What word of the Evangelos bronzes?" Surplus asked. He was sitting at a table out back of their inn,
nursing a small glass of retsina and admiring the sunset. The inn stood at the outskirts of town at the verge
of a forest, where pine, fir, and chestnut gave way to orchards, olive trees, cultivated fields, and pastures
for sheep and goats. The view from its garden could scarce be improved upon.

"None whatsoever. The locals are happy to recommend the ruins of this amphitheater or that nuclear
power plant, but any mention of bronze lions or a metal man causes them only to look blank and shake
their heads in confusion. I begin to suspect that scholar in Athens sold us a bill of goods."

"The biters bit! Well, 'tis an occupational hazard in our line of business."

"Sadly true. Still, if the bronzes will not serve us in one manner, they shall in another. Does it not strike
you as odd that two such avid antiquarians as ourselves have yet to see the ruins of St. Vasilios? I
propose that tomorrow we pay a courtesy visit upon the scientists there,"

Surplus grinned like a houndтАФwhich he was not, quite. He shook out his lace cuffs and, seizing his
silver-knobbed cane, stood. "I look forward to making their acquaintance."

"The locals say that they are building gods."

"Are they really? Well, there's a market for everything, I suppose."

Their plans were to take a strange turn, however. For that evening Dionysus danced through the town.

Darger was writing a melancholy letter home when the first shouts sounded outside his room. He heard
cries of "Pan! Great Pan!" and wild skirls of music. Going to the window, he saw an astonishing sight:
The townsfolk were pouring into the street, shedding their clothes, dancing naked in the moonlight for all
to see. At their head was a tall, dark figure who pranced and leaped, all the while playing the pipes.

He got only a glimpse, but its effect was riveting. He felt the god's passage as a physical thing. Stiffening,
he gripped the windowsill with both hands, and tried to control the wildness that made his heart pound
and his body quiver.

But then two young women, one a nymph and the other Theodosia, the innkeeper's daughter, burst into
his room and began kissing his face and urging him toward the bed.

Under normal circumstances, he would have sent them packingтАФhe hardly knew the ladies. But the
innkeeper's daughter and her goat-girl companion were both laughing and blushing so charmingly and