"M. John Harrison - Viriconium 2 - A Storm Of Wings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

here in events astronomical and enigmatic an intersection crucial to both the Earth and the precarious
foothold on it of the adolescent Evening Cultures. 'Wait! Things are. Things happen. Only wait!'The
estuarine cliffs impend, black, expectant; the air is full of frost and anticipation...

It is the hour of our old enemy, the Moon. Her fugitive reflections shiver on the water amid the cold
unmeaning patterns of the wind. Above, her tense circle aches across the sky (imprisoned there within it,
staring down, the pocked face of our mysterious crone, our companion of a million-million years).
Somewhere between midnight and dawn, in that hour when sick men topple from the high ledges of
themselves and fall into the darkness; suddenly and with no warning; something can be seen to detach
itself from the edge of that charmed circle and, through the terrible spaces surrounding, speed towards
the Earth. It is only a tiny puff of vapour, a cloud of pollen blown across a single ray of light in some
darkened, empty room - gone in the time it takes to blink, to rub the eyes and rearrange the waiting brain:
but nothing like this has been seen for ten thousand years; and though all might seem unchanged, and the
Moon hang never so white and hard over the rim of the cliffs, like a powdered face yearning from a
vacant doorway, and the memory decide the eye has played it false - nothing will ever be the same
again.

Not many hours later, as the thin, uncertain light of day spreads like smoke between the soft fat stems,
limning the fallen column of the tower, a figure emerges from the hemlock thickets - puzzled and reluctant
as if harried from a deep sleep - to scan the southern sky where the Moon is still a bone-white image, the
cankered face which lingers in a dream. The old man shivers a little, and settles his cloak about his
shoulders; they confront for a time, man and planet. But then in an instant, sunrise proper has splattered
everything below with blood - the sea, the shore, the hemlock and the old man's cloak all smeared and
dappled with it - and he turns urgently away to drag from cover a small crude wooden boat. Its keel
grates on the shingle, oars fall whitely on the water. The day brightens, but as he rows, the old man
winces from the ominous sky. Beaching his boat on the western shore, muttering and panting with the
effort, he pauses at the water's edge for a final glimpse of the tower, locked in its long struggle with
decay; then shrugs and hurries up a flight of steps cut long ago into the cliff. While behind him, a single
fish eagle with wings of a curious colour beats up out of the bright south and swoops over the island like
a valediction.

In the Time of the Locust it is given to us to see such things.

The Reborn Men do not think as we do. They live in waking dreams, pursued by a past they do not
understand, harried by a birthright which has no meaning to them: taunted by amnesia of the soul.

Alstath Fulthor, the first of them to be drawn by Tomb the Iron Dwarf from millenial interment in the
Lesser Rust Desert, remembered nothing of his previous life: instead, his steps were dogged by a
suspicion he could not make plain even to himself. His body, his blood, his very germ cells knew (or so it
seemed to him), but could find no everyday language in which to tell him what his life had been like during
the frigid lunacy of the Afternoon. Dark hints reached him. But the quivering fibrils of his nervous system
were adjusted to receive messages dispersed a thousand or more years before, intimations faded on the
winds of time.

In the months following his revival he dreamt constantly: Sometimes of a large silver insect, clicking and
metallic, the life-cycle of which he was able to observe in all its main aspects; at others of a woman (who
sat alone in a room so tall that its ceiling was a web of shadow, spinning a golden thread which, of its
own accord, rose and flickered from her hands until it filled all that mysterious, immense, whispering
space above her). In the ruck and ruin of Soubridge, with its warehouses full of rotting fish and
massacred children, during the long icy march through the Monar Mountains in winter, and at the