Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Poor Cruel Folk

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2024-11-24 0 0 8.28KB 3 页 5.9玖币

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Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Poor cruel folk

Bednye zlye lyudi

Translated by Fyodor Kondrashov (fedya@simons-rock.edu)

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

burping, that those arrows can be cast by anyone, that special slings are

needed that the angels have and that would be nice to take from them. And he

said then -- he was drunk then, -- that if it is nice to have, why not have

it, why not... Soon after that table talk one angel fell off the wall into

the moat, probably slipped. Next to him they found one of uncle's body

guards with a javelin between his shoulder blades. It was a dark, dark

deed... It good that the people did not care about the angels, they were

scary to look at, but it is not clear why is it scary -- angels were happy,

cordial people. Only their eyes were scary. Small, shiny, and they keep

racing around... non humanoid eyes, not peaceful. So the people hushed down,

although father, King Prostyaga gave them such freedom that it is shameful

to remember... although, before the Coup, father, they say was a saddle

maker. For saying so, with my own hands I had torn eyes out, and sewen ears

shut. But I remember, he used to sit in the evenings by the Crystal Tower,

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