"Smith, Clark Ashton - Tales of Averoigne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

with an eye towards the story's saleability, in view of the sexual nature
of the final scene. - Steve Behrends]
From: The Dark Eidolon 3, 1993, Necronomicon Press.
THEY WERE LYING coupled on a bed of golden moss, where the
sunrays fell through a cleft in the high foliage, when Raoul fond them.
They did not see or hear him; and their first intimation of his corning,
as well as their last, was the rapier which he drove through Olivier's
body till it pierced the bosom of Adele.
Adele screamed and twisted the corpse of Olivier moved in limp
unison with her twisting. Raoul drew the rapier out and made sure of
the woman with a second thrust. Then, with a vague feeling that he had
avenged his fashion, and a sense of dull, unhappy confusion, of
muddled and bleary wonder as to what it was all about, he stood
looking down at his victims.. __
They were both very quiet now, as beseems a couple who have been
slain in open adultery. And there was no movement, no sign of life, in
the lonely forest where so few people ever came. Therefore, M. Le
Comte was startled beyond all measure when he heard the wild,
malign, unhuman and diabolical cachinnation witch issued from the
alder boughs.
He raised his bloody rapier, and peered at the boughs, but he could
see nothing. The laughter ceased, and was not followed by any other
sound. He crossed himself, and began hurriedly to retrace the path by
which he had entered the wood.._
A Rendezvous in
Averoigne
GERARD DE L'AUTOMNE was meditating the rimes of a new ballade in
honor of Fleurette, as he followed the leaf-arrased pathway toward
Vyones through the woodland of Averoigne. Since he was on his way
to meet Fleurette, who had promised to keep a rendezvous among the
oaks and beeches like any peasant girl, Gerard himself made better
progress than the ballade. His love was at that stage which, even for a
professional troubadour, is more productive of distraction than
inspiration; and he was recurrently absorbed in a meditation upon
other than merely verbal felicities.
The grass and trees had assumed the fresh enamel of a mediaeval
May; the turf was figured with little blossoms of azure and white and
yellow, like an ornate broidery; and there was a pebbly stream that
murmured beside the way, as if the voices of undines were parleying
deliciously beneath its waters. The sun-lulled air was laden with a
wafture of youth and romance; and the longing that welled from the
heart of Gerard seemed to mingle mystically with the balsams of the
wood.
Gerard was a trouvere whose scant years and many wanderings had
brought him a certain renown. After the fashion of his kind he had
roamed from court to court, from chateau to chateau; and he was now
the guest of the Comte de la Frenaie, whose high castle held dominion
over half the surrounding forest. Visiting one day that quaint cathedral
town, Vyones, which lies so near to the ancient wood of Averoigne,
Gerard had seen Fleurette, the daughter of a well-to-do mercer named