"J.R.R. Tolkien - Bored of the Rings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

makes it possible to fix the date the boggies came on the scene with some
accuracy. In the same year, the 1,623rd year of the Third Age, the Naugahyde
brothers, Brasso and Drano, led a large following of boggies across the
Gallowine River disguised as a band of itinerant graverobbers and took control
from the high King at Ribroast. * [* Either Arglebargle IV or someone else.]
In return for the King's grudging acquiescence, they set up toll booths on the
roads and bridges, waylaid his messengers, and sent him suggestive and
threatening letters. In short, they settled down for a long stay.
Thus began the history of the Sty, and the boggies, with an eye to the
statutes of limitations, started a new calendar dating from the crossing of
the Gallowine. They were quite happy with their new land, and once again they
dropped out of the history of men, an occurrence which was greeted with the
same universal sense of regret as the sudden death of a mad dog. The Sty was
marked with great red splotches on all the AAA maps, and the only people who
ever passed through were either hopelessly lost or completely unhinged. Aside
from these rare visitors, the boggies were left entirely to themselves until
the time of Frito and Dildo. While there was still a King at Ribroast, the
boggies remained nominally his subjects, and to the last battle at Ribroast
with the Slumlord of Borax, they sent some snipers, though who they sided with
is unclear. There the North Kingdom ended, and the boggies returned to their
well-ordered, simple lives, eating and drinking, singing and dancing, and
passing bad checks.
Nonetheless, the easy life of the Sty had left the boggies fundamentally
unchanged, and they were still as hard to kill as a cockroach and as easy to
deal with as a cornered rat. Though likely to attack only in cold blood, and
killing only for money, they remained masters of the low blow and the gang-up.
They were crack shots and very handy with all sorts of equalizers, and any
small, slow, and stupid beast that turned its back on a crowd of boggies was
looking for a stomping.
All boggies originally lived in holes, which is after all hardly
surprising for creatures on a first-name basis with rats. In Dildo's time,
their abodes were for the most part built above ground in the manner of elves
and men, but these still retained many of the features of their traditional
homes and were indistinguishable from the dwellings of those species whose
chief function is to meet their makers, around August, deep in the walls of
old houses. As a rule, they were dumpling-shaped, built of mulch, silt, stray
divots, and other seasonal deposits, often whitewashed by irregular pigeons.
Consequently, most boggie towns looked as though some very large and untidy
creature, perhaps a dragon, had quite recently suffered a series of
disappointing bowel movements in the vicinity.
In the Sty as a whole there were at least a dozen of these curious
settlements, linked by a system of roads, post offices, and a government that
would have been considered unusually crude for a colony of cherrystone clams.
The Sty itself was divided into farthings, half-farthings, and Indian-head
nickels ruled by a mayor who was elected in a flurry of ballot-box stuffing
every Arbor Day. To assist him in his duties there was a rather large police
force which did nothing but extract confessions, mostly from squirrels. Beyond
these few tokens of regulation, the Sty betrayed no signs of government. The
vast majority of the boggies' time was taken up growing food and eating it and
making liquor and drinking it. The rest of it was spent throwing up.