The Emperor of the Ancient Word and Other Fantastic Stories. Darrell Schweitzer

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СКАЧАТЬ and sank back into the deep recesses of the royal bed, and dreamed of meat-pies, and so does not figure largely in our narrative.

      “And I have loved you so long,

      delighting in your company....”

      * * * * * * *

      Tom O’Bedlam sneezed and awoke. Nick lay beside him, still asleep, sniffling, but not for long, as the not-so-kindly innkeeper, who hadn’t so much allowed them to stay through the miserable cold of the night as failed to eject them because he was himself entirely too drunk (and customers lay snoring across the tables and benches of the common room; here and there somebody sneeze; a belch; flies or fleas or gnats hovered); verily, i’faith, this same innkeeper, arisen early, unsteady on his feet with an ugly expression on his face, approached them in his thundering, clumping boots with a bucket of slops in hand that he might manage to heave out into the street and then again maybe not, as he would have to step over the recumbent Tom and Nick to make his way to the door—

      “Nick,” Tom said, nudging him.

      Nick sneezed and swatted a louse off his cheek.

      “Nick, we have to go.”

      The innkeeper loomed clumpingly.

      Nick swatted again.

      Just in, as he thought to phrase it, the nick of time, Tom hauled his companion up and out the door and into the street. The innkeeper slipped or tripped, or out of sheer spite threw the slops after them. Foul liquid landed with a splat in the snow.

      * * * * * * *

      Still Peter the Poet gazed out his window into the darkness, which he fancied to be the darkness of his own melancholy.

      The words would not come.

      He scratched more rubbish on the page.

      I have been ready at your hand,

      to grant whatever you would crave.....

      He watched the Moon set. He watched it rise. The night would never end.

      * * * * * * *

      “Is it morning, Tom?”

      “It should be, yes.”

      “But, look—”

      Tom looked. The full Moon was setting in the west, but to the east another Moon was rising where the Sun should be. Birds in the eaves of the houses around them twittered and began to sing, then hesitated, uncertain of what to do next.

      “That’s not right, Tom,” said Nick.

      “No, ’tisn’t.”

      They had to scramble aside as a troop of guards with pikes and armor, with banners flying, with moonlight gleaming off their silver helmets, came tramping down the street, screeching “Make way! Make way for our great lady!”

      They bore their lady in a sedan chair. She gazed out through the curtain, resplendent in her fiery, jewels gleaming, regarding the two madmen through a glass of some sort, which only magnified her hideous face, which was that of a naked skull.

      Her guardsmen screeched because their heads were not those of men, but of ravens and crows.

      “That’s not right either,” said Nick.

      “No, ‘tisn’t.”

      They stared after the company as it passed.

      And so the day passed too, though it was a misuse of the term to call it a day, as there was no daylight in it, as the Moon passed again across the sky amid stars which seemed subtly out of place. And the Moon made to set, and yet another rose in the east; and the cold of the night continued; and though Tom and Nick half-heartedly capered at times, and did their tricks in the cold and the snow—Nick lit a candle at both ends and swallowed it, and spat it up again, still burning—no one gave them any pennies for their pains. There were only ghosts abroad, and ghouls, skeletons, the King of Faerie with his rout, the occasional furtive wizard, the former Lord Chancellor of England in all his state (but minus head) and frequent lunatics—there being such a surfeit of Moons that for the moonstruck it was a very special occasion indeed.

      * * * * * * *

      Yet the respectable folk of England were still in their beds, still asleep, in the night that would not end.

      Peter the Poet paced, not asleep at all.

      King Henry dreamed of meat-pies.

      * * * * * * *

      Tom and Nick came upon a man who sat calmly on a low wall. As they approached he rolled his eyes and shook his head, made a gobbling noise, and fell over backwards into a snowy rubbish heap.

      Tom looked down over the wall.

      “Never mind the formalities. Can’t ye tell we’re as mad as thou art—?”

      “Forsooth,” said Nick. “Or possibly fivesooth.”

      But the other merely groped among the rubbish, crooned, and said, “Do not wake me from this wondrous dream, for I lie in the arms of a beautiful maiden!”

      Nick regarded him, then turned away.

      “Is it sooth he says?”

      “No, ’tisn’t.”

      “You keep saying that.”

      “That’s because a madman must be obsessed, Nicholas. Therefore he hath tics and twinges and odd tatters of phrase, which he repeateth anon and anon, as, well, one whose wits are diseas’d—”

      “Oh, aye.”

      “You ought to do it more yourself. Keep your madness in good trim, for Madness, though the most natural and unpracticed thing in the world, requires practice, which is a paradox, as ’twas told to me by a pair o’doxies once in a particularly friendly fashion—”

      But before Tom could continue his discourse, lunatic as it might be, Nick tried to remind him that none of this would matter a jot if they both froze to death in the dark.

      “That nears dangerously close to common sense,” said Tom. “Stop it.”

      But even as he spoke there came One with hooded robe and scythe and hourglass.

      “Do I not know you two?”

      Tom shook his head and jingled his bells.

      “We’ve met before, perhaps?”

      Tom and Nick shook their heads in unison.

      “Let me look it up.” Bony fingers flipped through a notebook made of tiny tombstones, which clapped thunder as the pages turned.

      But Tom reached over and flipped the pages back, with a thunder, a crackle, and a crack, losing the place.

      “This gets СКАЧАТЬ