"Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Poor cruel folk" - читать интересную книгу автора

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Poor cruel folk

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© Copyright by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
© Copyright 1998 by Fyodor Kondrashov, english translation
Бедные злые люди
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Translated by Fyodor Kondrashov ([email protected])

The King sat naked. Like a foolish pauper on the street, he sat leaning
against a cold wall, drawing in his blue, goose-bumped legs. He shivered,
with his eyes closed, he listened, but everything was quiet.
He awoke at midnight from a nightmare and immediatelly understood that
he was finished. Some one weezed and writhed by the door of the bedroom
suite, he heard footsteps, metalic jingling and drunken mummbling of His
Highness, Uncle Buht: "Let me through... Let me.. Break it down, hell with
it..." Wet with icy sweat, he slintly rolled off his bed, ducked into a
secter closet, and loosing himself he ran down the underground passage.
Something sqelched under his bare feet, the startled rats dashed away, but
he did not notice anything, just now, sitting next to a wall he remembered
everything; the darkness, the slippery walls, and the pain from a blow on
the head against the shakled door to the temple, and his own unberable high
yelp.
They shall not enter here, he thought. No one shall enter here. Only if
the King order's so. But the King shall not order... He snickered
hysterically. Oh no, the King will not order! He carefully un screwed up his
eyes and saw his blue, hairless legs with scraped knees. Still alive, he
thought. I will live, because they shall not enter here.
Everything in the temple was blueish from the cold light of the
lanterns -- long glowing tubes that were stretched under the ceiling. In the
center, God stood on an eminence, big, heavy, with sparkling dead eyes. The
King continuously and stupidly stared, until God was suddenly screened by a
shabby lay brother, still a greenhorn. Scraching, with an open mouth he
gazed at the naked King. The King squinted once again. Scum, he thought, a
lousy vermine, catch the mongrel and to the dogs, for them to ravage... He
reasoned that he did not remember the lout well, but he was long gone. So
scrawny, snotty... That's all right, we'll remember. We'll remeber
everything, Your Highness, Uncle Buht. During the father's reighn, I dare
say you sat quietly, drank a bit and kept silent, were afraid to be noticed,
you knew that King Prostyaga did not forget you ignoble treachery...
Great was the father, the King thought with an accustomed envy. You'd
be great, if your advisors are God's angels in flesh. All know, all have
seen them: their faces fearful, white, like milk, and their garment were
such that one could not understand if they were naked or not. And their
arrows were fiery, like lightning, they drove off the nomads with the
arrows, and although they casted them overhead, half the horde cripled from
fear. His Highness, Uncle Buht, wispered once upon a time, drunk and