"Brown,.Mary.-.Unicorn's.Ring.1.-.1986.-.Unlikely.Ones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Mary)

brandishing home-made spear, sword or some-such who insisted on defending a
symbolic maiden staked out in front of his feast; he even retreated the
regulation ten paces in mock-submission before insisting on his roast. He had
flown forth that day secure in the knowledge that he need only wait for the
better weather of the equinox to return Home with the assorted extras of gold
helm, breastplate, mail, dishes, brooches, bowl, buckles and coin (there was too
much silver to carry) and the glory of the necessary jewels, and was urged on
with a healthy hunger for his last tribute. The side of beef had, he remembered,
been slightly underdone, and he had had to barbecue it a little himself to bring
out that nice charred flavour that added scrunch to bones and singe to fat. He
remembered, too, that he had obligingly restarted the damp, smoky fire on which
his rather unflattering effigy was regularly cremated, and had even joined in
the dancing and jollification that always succeeded his surrogate demise, and so
it had been well after midnight when he had returned to the cave, replete,
sticky and tired, to find—
The end of his world, and a heap of pebbles.
* * *
His quest had been specific: one each of ruby, emerald, diamond, sapphire and
lastly, the pearl. And any incidentals by way of gold or silver, of course. The
ruby had been an easy snatch-and-grab, but the emerald had required travel at
the worst time of year over seas grey and wrinkled as an elephant's hide; the
diamond had proved troublesome and the sapphire fiendishly difficult, but one
expected a gradation of difficulty in all quests, and he had been well within
the hundred-year limit when the fresh-water oyster had yielded the final
treasure, his personal dragon-pearl beyond price, the largest and most perfect
he had ever seen, mistletoe-moon-coloured and perfectly cylindrical.
And now? And now he remembered as vividly as ever his return to the furtive
sweat-smell of excited theft in the night, an unidentified shadow that left only
a silhouette of the sorcery that had accompanied it. He had roared out into the
dark, his whole body twisting into an agonized coruscation of shining scales
whose thunderous passage through the gaps between the mountain and the hills had
left a rain of split rocks and splintering shale cascading in a black torrent to
the valleys beneath. But there had been no sight, no sound of the thing he
sought, only the taint of a thing that crawled, that flew, that walked, that
ran; a shape intangible, a sniggering darkness that fled faster than he could
pursue and left no trail to follow. And this—this Thief-without-a-name—had
stolen his jewels, his quest, his very life, for he could not return Home
without those precious things. The gold was still there, true, but it was merely
incidental: every dragon collected gold as a child might gather shells from the
shore, but the jewels were special. They were the confirmation of his maturity,
the price of his transition from Novice to Master-Dragon, and without these
proofs of his quest, the badges of his success, he was condemned to die. Oh, not
a sudden execution, that perhaps he would have welcomed: rather an exile's slow
withering, an embering and ashing of the once-bright fires, a shrivelling of
scales from calcined bones, a fossil's hardening in the remorseless silt of the
years. And if he attempted to return without his treasure there would be the
turned shoulder, the stifled snigger, the, in itself, mortal loss of face that
would be death in life. And he could not bear that: better to die a suicide of
wasting, cold and hunger on this wretched Black Mountain far from home; better
to suffer the slow pangs of winter and starvation than to return disgraced.