"Anthony Piers - Bearing an Hourglass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

"I'll do any man a favor-any woman, too!-but I don't think there's very much I can do for a ghost. I presume you're not much interested in physical things."

"Interested, but not able," the ghost said. "Sit down, eat your supper. And listen, if you will, to my story. Then the nature of the favor will be apparent."

"Always glad for company, real or imaginary," Norton said, sitting down on a conveniently placed rock.

"I'm no hallucination," the ghost assured him. "I'm a genuine person who happens to be dead."

And while Norton ate, the specter made his presentation. "I was born into a wealthy and noble family," Gawain said. "I was named after Sir Gawain of the ancient Round Table of King Arthur's Court; Sir Gawain is a distant ancestor, and great things were expected of me from the outset. Before I could walk I could handle a knife; I shredded my mattress and crawled out to stalk the household puk-"

"Puck?"

"Puk-a small household dragon. Ours was only half a yard long. I gave it an awful scare; it had been napping in a sunbeam. My folks had to put me in a steel playpen after that. At age two I fashioned a rope out of my blanket and scaled the summit of the playpen wall and went after the cat. I vivisected her after she scratched me for cutting off her tail. So they brought in a werecat who changed into the most forbidding old shrew when I bothered her. She certainly had my number; when I toasted her feline tail with a hotfoot, she wered human and toasted my tail with a belt. I developed quite an aggravation for magical animals."

"I can imagine," Norton said politely. He himself was always kind to animals, especially wild ones, though he would defend himself if attacked. There were things about Gawain he was not fully comfortable with.

"I was sent to gladiator school," the ghost continued. "I wanted to go, and for some reason my family preferred to have me out of the house. I graduated second in my class. I would have been first, but the leading student had enchanted armor, even at night, so I couldn't dispatch him. Canny character! After that, I bought a fine outfit of my own, proof against any blade or bullet or magic bolt. Then I set out to make my fortune.

"There are not many dragons around, compared to mundane animals, and most of them are protected species. Actually, I respect dragons; they are a phenomenal challenge. It's too bad that it took so long for man really to master magic; only in the last fifty years or so has it become a formidable force. I suppose it was suppressed by the Renaissance, when people felt there had to be rational explanations for everything. As a result of that ignorance, dragons and other fantastic creatures had a much harder time of it than they had during the medieval age in Europe. Some masqueraded as mundane animals- unicorns cutting off their horns to pass for horses, griffins shearing their wings and donning lion-head masks, that sort of thing-and some were kept hidden on private estates by conservationists who cared more for nature than for logic. A number developed protective illusion so they looked a good deal more mundane than they were, and Satan salvaged a few, though most of His creatures are demonic. But now at last the supernatural is back in fashion, and fantastic creatures are becoming unextinct.

"But some creatures do get obstreperous. Most bleeding-heart liberal, modem governments have bent the other way so far they've gone off the deep end and outlawed poisoning or shooting or using magic to kill these monsters. So the bad dragons have to be dispatched the old-fashioned way, by sword."

"Why not just move the bad ones to reservations?" Norton asked, appalled at the notion of slaying dragons. He was one of the bleeding hearts the ghost described; he knew dragons were ornery and dangerous, but so were alligators and tigers. All of them had their right to exist as species, and the loss of any species was an incalculable loss to the world. Many highly significant aspects of magic had been derived from once-suppressed creatures, such as potency-spells from unicorn horns and invulnerable scale armor from dragon hides. But he realized it would be pointless to argue such cases with this fortune-hunting warrior.

Gawain snorted. "Mister, you can't move a dragon! They're worse than cats! Once a drag stakes out his territory, he defends it. Enchant the monster and move it to a reservation, it just breaks out and returns, twice as ornery as before, killing innocent people along the way. No, I respect dragons as opponents, but the only really good dragon is a dead one."

Norton sighed inwardly. Perhaps it was a good thing for the world that Gawain was now a ghost.

'That was my specialty," Gawain continued. "The hand slaying of dragons. It was dangerous work, to be sure- but the rewards were considerable. Because it was quasilegal, fees were high. I estimated that five or six years of dragon slaying would make me independently wealthy. That was the point: to prove that I wasn't simply inheriting wealth, but could produce it on my own. I knew my family would be pleased; every man in it increased the fortune, if he lived long enough."

Gawain meditated for a moment, and Norton did not interrupt him. What would be the point? Norton had on occasion spotted the traces of dragons in the parks and had always given the monsters a wide berth. He might be an environmentalist, but he was no fool. It was said that some dragons in parks were halfway tame and would not attack a person if he gave them food or jewelry, but Norton had never trusted such folklore. The best way to deal with a dragon was to stay clear of it, unless a person had a really competent pacification-spell.

"I know what you're thinking," Gawain said. "Obviously I met one dragon too many! But in my defense, I do want to say that I was successful for five years and had almost amassed my target level in bonus money. I would be alive today if that last dragon I faced had been genuine. But you see, it wasn't; it had been mislabeled. Oh, I don't blame the natives-not much, anyway; they were a fairly primitive tribe in South America and they spoke a mixture of Amerind and Spanish, while I spoke the language of champions, English. Normally language is not much of a barrier; my armor and sword bespoke my profession, with the dragon design on my shield; and as for the women-a man never needs a language of the tongue to speak his use for them, especially when he's a warrior. These things are fairly standard, anyway; the conquering hero always gets his pick of the local virgins. After all, it's better for them than getting chomped by the dragon!"

He paused a moment, his lips twitching. "Funny that some of those girls don't seem to see it that way."

He shrugged and returned to the main theme. "But I think they were honestly ignorant of the nature of their monster. Of course, I should have checked it out in the Dragon Registry-but I had traveled a long way, and the nearest civilized outpost was a half day's trek distant- couldn't use a standard flying carpet for this, of course, since those things are coded into the tour computers, and that would have given away my business-it would have delayed me a day just to do that, and maybe alerted the Dragon Patrol. So I tackled that dragon blind, as it were. I'll never do that again! I was cocky and foolish, I know- but I was familiar with the specs on just about every type of dragon in the world; I figured I was okay this one time.

"So there I was, afoot and armed with sword and shield, as is proper for such encounters, and I boldly braved the lair of the monster. And monster it was! I could see claw marks on the big trees some ten feet up. A real challenge! I marched up to its cave and bellowed out my challenge, and the monster came charging out, no fire, just growling-and then I realized my mistake. That was no dragon-it was a dinosaur! A largely bipedal carnivorous reptile-allosaurus, to be specific; I looked it up after it was too late. It was supposed to be extinct; I think Satan revived it, just to take me down a peg."

Now Norton spoke. "Isn't a dinosaur much like a dragon?"

"Yes and no," Gawain said seriously. This was his field of expertise. "It should be as easy to slay one as the other, as they are of similar nature. Dragons have fire and better armor, and some are unbecomingly smart, while the ancient camosaurs-well, they have to do it all by tooth and claw and power, so they're both more single-minded and desperate. I was geared and trained for dragons; I knew their typical foibles. A dragon, for example, will always try to scorch you with its fire or steam first; dodge that jet, and you can often get in a lethal stroke while it's recovering its breath. It's blast-oriented, you see, not thinking about what comes next. But the allosaurus-that monster didn't even pause to see how it scored, because it had no attack heat. It simply charged, catching me off guard. I had been ready to dodge to the side, and that was no good this time. I stabbed it in the neck with my sword, but it didn't seem to notice. That's another difference-a dragon will roar with pain and rage when injured-they are inordinately proud of their roars-and whip about to snap at the wound. I've seen a dragon get stabbed with a knife and reach about and bite that knife right out of its body, along with a few pounds of its own flesh, and toast the wound afterward to cauterize it. This camosaur just kept going for me. Its system was more primitive. You know how a snake's tail will keep twitching after you cut it off? True reptiles are slow to die, even when hacked to pieces. So again I misjudged it-and again I paid. The brute knocked me down and took a chomp of my body, armor and all. I didn't even try to scramble free; I knew a body-chomp would only dent the monster's teeth.

"That was my third error. Apparently enchantment has a sizable psychological component; people believe in its power, so it has power. A dragon would have known the armor was impermeable, since the smell of the spell was on it, and protected its teeth by easing up. The crunch would have been more show than serious; just testing, as it were. But this allosaurus dated from before the time of true magic and it gave a full-hard chomp, the kind that crunches bones."

"But magic isn't all psychological!" Norton protested. "When I lighted this fire, the wood didn't need to believe in magic; it was ignited anyway."

"True. My armor was impervious to the teeth of the monster," Gawain agreed. "But the mail was flexible, so I could wear it with comfort and not be restricted when fighting. That reptile had very powerful jaws. When it crunched, no tooth penetrated-but I was squished to death. A dragon never would have done that, for fear of hurting its teeth against the magical hardness of the armor-but that stupid reptile did. It broke a number of its teeth and put itself in dire straits-but it wiped me out in the process." The ghost sounded disgusted.