"03 - Priest-Kings of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

If I had seen this man in my own world, this small, rotund, merry gentleman with his florid colouring and cheerful manner I would have thought him necessarily English, and of a sort one seldom encounters nowadays. If one had encountered him in the Eighteenth Century one might take him for a jolly, snuff-sniffing, roisterous country squire, knowing himself the salt of the earth, not above twitting the parson nor pinching the serving girls; in the Nineteenth Century he would have owned an old book shop and worked at a high desk, quite outdated, kept his money in a sock, distributed it indiscriminately to all who asked him for it, and publicly read Chaucer and Darwin to scandalise lady customers and the local clergy; in my own time such a man could only be a college professor, for there are few other refuges save wealth left in my world for men such as he; one could imagine him ensconced in a university chair, perhaps affluent enough for gout, reposing in his tenure, puffing on his pipe, a connoisseur of ales and castles, a gusty afficionado of bawdy Elizabethan drinking songs, which he would feel it his duty to bequeath, piously, as a portion of their rich literary heritage, to generations of recent, proper graduates of Eton and Harrow. The small eyes regarded me, twinkling.

With a start I noticed that the pupils of his eyes were red.

When I started a momentary flicker of annoyance crossed his features, but in an instant he was again his chuckling, affable, bubbling self.

'Come, come,' he said. 'Come along, Cabot. We have been waiting for you.'

He knew my name.

Who was waiting?

But of course he would know my name, and those who would be waiting would be the Priest-Kings of Gor.

I forgot about his eyes, for it did not seem important at the time, for some reason. I suppose that I thought that I had been mistaken. I had not been. He now stepped back into the shadows of the passage.

'You are coming, aren't you?' he asked.

'Yes,' I said.

'My name is Parp,' he said, standing back in the passage. He puffed once on his pipe. 'Parp,' he repeated, puffing once again.

He had not extended his hand.

I looked at him without speaking.

It seemed a strange name for a Priest-King. I do not know what I expected. He seemed to sense my puzzlement.

'Yes,' said the man, 'Parp.' He shrugged. 'It's not much of a name for a Priest-King, but then I'm not much of a Priest-King.' He chuckled.

'Are you a Priest-King?' I asked.

Again a momentary flicker of annoyance crossed his features. 'Of course,' he said.

It seemed that my heart stopped beating.

At that moment one of the larls gave a sudden roar. I shivered, but to my surprise the man who called himself Parp clutched his pipe in his white hand and seemed to give a start of terror. In a moment he was quite recovered. I found it strange that a Priest-King should fear a larl.

Without waiting to see if I would follow him he turned suddenly and went back down the passage.

I gathered my weapons and followed him. Only the rumbling growl of the now sullen mountain larls as I passed between them convinced me that I could not be dreaming, that I had come at last to the Hall of Priest-Kings.

Chapter Four: THE HALL OF PRIEST-KINGS

As I followed the man who called himself Parp down the stone passage the portal behind me closed. I remember one last glimpse of the Sardar Range, the path I had climbed, the cold, blue sky and two snowy larls, one chained on either side of the entrance.

My host did not speak but led the way with a merry stride, an almost constant curl of smoke from his little round pipe encircling his bald pate and muttonchop whiskers and drifting back down the passage.

The passage was lit with energy bulbs, of the sort which I had encountered in the tunnel of Marlenus which led beneath the walls of Ar. There was nothing in the lighting of the passage, or its construction, to suggest that the Priest-Kings' Caste of Builders, if they had one, was any more advanced than that of the men below the mountains. Too, the passage was devoid of ornament, lacking the mosaics and tapestries with which the beauty-loving Goreans below the mountains are wont to glorify the places of their own habitation. The Priest-Kings, as far as I could tell, had no art. Perhaps they would regard it as a useless excrescence detracting from the more sobre values of life, such as, I supposed, study, meditation and the manipulation of the lives of men.