"Karl Edward Wagner - The Other One" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wagner Karl Edward)

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The Other One
Karl Edward Wagner




There is a story, so it is told, of certain bandits who took shelter beneath a
tree, and as the darkness and the storm closed over them, they gathered about
their fire and said to their leader: "Tell us a tale, to pass the night hours
in this lonely place;" and their leader spoke to them: "Once certain bandits
took shelter beneath a tree, and as the darkness and the storm closed over
them, they gathered about their fire and said to their leader: "Tell us a
tale, to pass the night hours in this lonely place; 'and their leader spoke to
them: 'Once certain bandits took shelter beneath a tree...'"


Blacker against the darkening sky, the thousand-armed branches of the huge
banyan swayed and soughed before the winds of the storm. Tentative spats of
rain struck the barren stones beyond their shelter--streaking like the ranging
shots of massed archers from the lowering thunderheads that marched toward
them from across the desolate plain beyond.
Someone got a fire going. Yellow flames crackled and spat as the damp twigs
caught; grey smoke crawled through the roof of banyan limbs to be whipped away
by the winds. There were more than ten of them about the fire--outlaws and
renegades whose dirty mail and mismatched matched weapons showed the proof of
hard and bloody service.
Another hundred of them might have gathered beneath the banyan, pressed
between its pillared maze of limbs and roots. The tree had spread its limbs
and stabbed downward its roots, growing upward and outward for imperturbable
centuries. Behind--along the trail the outlaws had followed--lay unbroken
miles of tropical forest. Beyond--toward which their path led--stretched a
miles-wide plain of utter desolation. Beneath the grey curtain of the
approaching storm, could be glimpsed the walls of forest that enclosed the
farther perimeters of the plain.
Across the jungle-girded plain, new forest crept through where a century
before had been carefully tilled fields, crawled over flattened stones and
heaps of broken rubble where once had reared a great city. Of the city, no
walls or towers remained; so utter was its destruction that scarcely one stone
yet stood upon its base. It was an expanse of total annihilation--a wasteland
of toppled stone and fire-scarred rubble. After more than a century, only
scrub and vine and secondary forest had invaded the ruin. More than another
century would pass before the last mound of shattered wall would vanish
beneath the conquering forest.
They gathered about their fire, laying aside their well-worn gear, pulling out
such as they had to make their evening meal. Three days march, or maybe