"Stanley G. Weinbaum - Margaret Of Urbs 01 - The Black Flame" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

the hill country, and where the occasional farms were broader, well tilled, more prosperous. The trail had
become a wagon road, and here it cut and angled between two lines of forest. And unexpectedly a
manтАФno, two menтАФ rose from a log at the roadside and approached Hull. He watched them; one was
tall and light-haired as himself, but without his mighty frame, and the other was a head shorter, and dark.
Valley people, surely, for the dark one had a stubby pistol at his belt, wooden-stocked like those of the
Ancients, and the tall man's bow was of glittering spring steel.

"Ho, mountainy!" said the dark one. "Where going?"

"Norse," answered Hull shortly.

"What's in the bag?"

"My tongue,"* snapped the youth.

"Easy, there," grunted the light man. "No offense, mountainy. We're just curious. That's a good knife
you got. I'll trade it."

"For what?"

"For lead in your craw," growled the dark one. Sud-denly the blunt pistol was in his hand. "Pass it
over, and the bag too."

Hull scowled from one to the other. At last he shrugged, and moved as if to lift his bag from his
shoulders. And then, swift as the thrust of a striking diamondback, his left foot shot forward, catching the
dark one squarely in the pit of his stomach, with the might of Hull's muscles and weight behind it.

The man had breath for a low grunt; he doubled and fell, while his weapon spun a dozen feet away
into the dust. The light one sprang for it, but Hull caught him with a great arm about his throat, wrenched
twice, and the brief fight was over. He swung placidly on toward Norse with a blunt revolver primed and
capped at his hip, a glistening spring-steel bow on his shoulder, and twenty-two bright tubular steel
arrows in his quiver.

He topped a little rise and the town lay before him. He stared. A hundred houses at least. Must be
five hun-dred people in the town, more people than he'd ever seen in his life all together. He strode
eagerly on, goggling at the church that towered high as a tall tree, at the win-dows of bits of glass
salvaged from ancient ruins and carefully pieced together, at the tavern with its swinging emblem of an
unbelievably fat man holding a mammoth mug. He stared at the houses, some of them with shops before
them, and at the people, most of them shod in leather.

* Idiom of the second century of the Enlightenment. To have "one's tongue in the bag" was to refuse
to answer questions.

He himself attracted little attention. Norse was used to the mountainies, and only a girl or two turned
ap-praising eyes toward his mighty figure. That made him uncomfortable, however; the girls of the
mountains gig-gled and blushed, but never at that age did they stare at a man. So he gazed defiantly
back, letting his eyes wander from their bonnets to the billowing skirts above their leather strap-sandals,
and they laughed and passed on.

Hull didn't care for Norse, he decided. As the sun set, the houses loomed too close, as if they'd stifle