"Tad Williams - Otherland 1 - City of Golden Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

man began to shriek again, piping like a boiling lobster.
"Got a light?"
Paul turned. Pale beer-yellow eyes peered from a mask of mud beside him. The apparition,
crouched on hands and knees, wore a greatcoat so tattered it seemed made from cobwebs.
"What?"
"Got a light? A match?"
The normality of the question, in the midst of so much that was unreal, left Paul wondering if
he had heard correctly. The figure lifted a hand as muddy as the face, displaying a thin white
cylinder so luminously clean that it might have dropped from the moon.
"Can you hear, fellow? A light?"
Paul reached into his pocket and fumbled with numbed fingers until he found a box of matches,
miraculously dry. The wounded soldier began howling even louder, lost in the wilderness a stone's
throw away.
The man in the ragged greatcoat tipped himself against the side of the trench, fitting the
curve of his back into the sheltering mud, then delicately pulled the cigarette into two pieces
and handed one to Paul. As he lit the match, he tilted his head to listen.
"God help me, he's still going on up there." He passed the matches back and held the flame
steady so Paul could light his own cigarette. "Why couldn't Fritz drop one on him and give us all
a little peace?"
Paul nodded his head. Even that was an effort.
His companion lifted his chin and let out a dribble of smoke which curled up past the rim of
his helmet and vanished against the flat morning sky. "Do you ever get the feeling. . . ?"
"Feeling?"
"That it's a mistake." The stranger wagged his head to indicate the trenches, the German guns,
all of the Western Front. "That God's away, or having a bit of a sleep or something. Don't you
find yourself hoping that one day He'll look down and see what's happening and . . . and do
something about it?"
Paul nodded, although he had never thought the matter through in such detail. But he had felt
the emptiness of the gray skies, and had occasionally had a curious sensation of looking down on
the blood and mud from a great distance, observing the murderous deeds of war with the detachment
of a man standing over an anthill. God could not be watching, that was certain; if He was, and if
He had seen the things Paul Jonas had seen--men who were dead but didn't know it, frantically
trying to push their spilled guts back into their blouses; bodies swollen and flyblown, lying
unretrieved for days within yards of friends with whom they had sung and laughed--if He had seen
all that but not interfered, then He must be insane.
But Paul had never for a moment believed that God would save the tiny creatures slaughtering
each other by the thousands over an acre of shell-pocked mud. That was too much like a fairy tale.
Beggar boys did not marry princesses; they died in snowy streets or dark alleys . . . or in muddy
trenches in France, while old Papa God took a long rest.
He summoned up his strength. "Heard anything?"
The stranger drew deeply on his cigarette, unconcerned that the ember was burning against his
muddy fingers, and sighed. "Everything. Nothing. You know. Fritz is breaking through in the south
and he'll go right on to Paris. Or now the Yanks are in it, we're going to roll them right up and
march to Berlin by June. The Winged Victory of Samo-whatsit appeared in the skies over Flanders,
waving a flaming sword and dancing the hootchy-coo. It's all shit."
"It's all shit," Paul agreed. He drew once more on his own cigarette and then dropped it into
a puddle. He watched sadly as muddy water wicked into the paper and the last fragments of tobacco
floated free. How many more cigarettes would he smoke before death found him? A dozen? A hundred?
Or might that one be his last? He picked up the paper and squeezed it into a tight ball between