"Howard Waldrop & Leigh Kennedy - One Horse Town" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

straight from bed as well, waving his thick arms and shouting out in a basso growl. "What's happening?"
Probably from years of practice, his half-grown sons duck and weave around his great flying elbows, two
curious kids wondering what the mayhem was all about.
"What's this about a goodbye present?" Laocoon says. "This is a trick." He turns to borrow a staff from
one of his gang of water-worshipping thugs. With a mighty swing (why wasn't he ever on the battlefield, I
wonder?), he bashes it on the side of the horse.
The wood made a moaning, low sound, the stick playing it like an equine string. Eerie.
"This is a trick!" Laocoon repeats.
"Oh, shove off, Laocoon!" a man shouts. "Go soak your head in the sea!" There is enough laughter that
the man swaggers.
King Priam raises his hands, his wrists like twigs, his face mournful, but he's got that magic touch of a
king. Everyone falls silent. "Let's examine the matter," he pipes in an old man's voice.
Then I see Cassandra, coming down beside Laocoon's crowd. "Don't touch it! Get rid of it!" she yells. "It
will destroy the city!"
But when Aeneas laughs, everyone joins him. "It's just a pile of sticks, Cassie!"
Several people start hitting the horse again, making it shiver like a big drum.
Laocoon raises his arms to demand silence. It sounds to me like Laocoon says, "Ween ye, blind
hoddypecks, it contains some Greekish navy," but the crowd was still making lots of noise.
His clinging sons look out wide-eyed from behind their father's back. Laocoon's voice is booming. "How
can you trust the Greeks?" Poseidon's priest asks, staring down Aeneas but not looking at King Priam.
The laughter and banging stops.
Leo and I have relaxed. With the Greeks gone there seems to be no need to watch the plain any longer.
Mistake. But I don't know what we could have done about what happened next anyway.
"Oh, look," says someone by the gate, pointing towards where the Greek ships used to be. Huge winding
shapes were swimming across the land. "Big snakes."

Later, after the snakes have slithered away, a smaller crowd reforms around the horse and the three mangled
bodies of Laocoon and his two sons. They look like something the butcher throws to the dogs at the end of a
hard week, but smell worse, like shit and rotten meat. Even though we both would have preferred to be on the
battlefield without weapons than do this digusting chore, Leo and I help scoop the bodies onto shields to take
back to the family. I always hate the moment that the wails begin; it's almost worse waiting for the wails than
hearing them.
Many of the onlookers are inside the gates again, wet patches where they had been standing. Cassandra
leads a shocked King Priam away with daughterly concern. Aeneas is stunned. He rubs his arm and says,
"That was very unexpected," first looking at the bodies, then speculatively towards the sea.
I don't like being down here, off the wall, now. "Where did the snakes go?"
One of our old soldiers, out of breath from running, holds a corner of the shield while I lift the smallest boy
onto it. He says, "They crawled straight up into Athena's temple, circled round the statue, then vanished into
a hole in the ground."
"What should we do with the horse, Lord Aeneas?" one of our soldiers asks.
Aeneas doesn't answer, still distracted. "I must go," he says and strides up the hill towards the palace.
With the royals scared off and the priest mangled, we don't know what to do. Leo, myself and two other
soldiers take the bodies of Laocoon and his sons up to his temple. The women come pouring out, screaming.

You think they'd be used to death by now. But even I felt a wrench when they hovered over the horrible,
bloated faces of the little boys.
We miss the arrival of Sinon, the wretched Greek, left behind by his countrymen for his treasonous
attitudes. He's spitting angry at his fellow Greeks. He is taken to good King Priam and explains everything,
wanting revenge on Greeks for the planning to sacrifice him for good winds.
King Priam finally gets out of him that the big horse is an offering to Athena to appease her for what