"David G. Hartwell - Year's Best Fantasy 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

The man didn’t sleep ten blinks. Then with first light he followed a hunch, walking half a dozen long
strides up the gully and thrusting a shovel into what looked like a mound of ordinary clay.

The shovel was good steel, but a dull thunk announced that something beneath was harder by a long
ways.

Barrow used the shovel and a big pickax, working fast and sloppy, investing the morning to uncover a
long piece of the dragon’s back—several daggerlike spines rising from perhaps thirty big plates of ruddy
armor.

Exhaustion forced him to take a break, eating his fill and drinking the last of his water. Then, because they
were hungry and a little thirsty, he led both of his loyal camels down the gully, finding a flat plain where
sagebrush grew and seepage too foul for a man to drink stood in a shallow alkaline pond.

The happy camels drank and grazed, wandering as far as their long leashes allowed.

Barrow returned to his treasure. Twice he dug into fresh ground, and twice he guessed wrong, finding
nothing. The monster’s head was almost surely missing. Heads almost always were. But he tried a third
time, and his luck held. Not only was the skull entombed along with the rest of the carcass, it was still
attached to the body, the long muscular neck having twisted hard to the left as the creature passed from
the living.

It had been a quick death, he was certain.

There were larger specimens, but the head was magnificent. What Barrow could see was as long as he
was tall, narrow and elegant, a little reminiscent of a pelican’s head, but prettier, the giant mouth bristling
with a forest of teeth, each tooth bigger than his thumb. The giant dragon eyes had vanished, but the large
sockets remained, filled with mudstone and aimed forward like a hawk’s eyes. And behind the eyes lay a
braincase several times bigger than any man’s.

“How did you die?” he asked his new friend.

Back in town, an educated fellow had explained to Barrow what science knew today and what it was
guessing. Sometimes the dragons had been buried in mud, on land or underwater, and the mud protected
the corpse from its hungry cousins and gnawing rats. If there were no oxygen, then there couldn’t be any
rot. And that was the best of circumstances. Without rot, and buried inside a stable deep grave, an entire
dragon could be kept intact, waiting for the blessed man to ride by on his happy camel.

Barrow was thirsty enough to moan, but he couldn’t afford to stop now.

Following the advice of other prospectors, he found the base of the dragon’s twin wings—the wings still
sporting the leathery flesh strung between the long, long finger bones—and he fashioned a charge with
dynamite, setting it against the armored plates of the back and covering his work with a pile of tamped
earth to help force the blast downward. Then, with a long fuse, he set off the charge. There was a dull
thud followed by a steady rain of dirt and pulverized stone, and he ran to look at what he had
accomplished, pulling back the shattered plates—each worth half a good camel when intact—and then
using a heavy pick to pull free the shattered insides of the great beast.

If another dragon had made this corpse, attacking this treasure from below, there would be nothing left to
find. Many millions of years ago, the precious guts would have been eaten, and lost.