Pegasus, Lion, and Centaur
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“This is only in the last week. What do a system administrator, a gym teacher, a theatre lighting technician, a student, a boiler room attendant, and a deaf fellow, a former musician, have in common?” she asked, hiding the photographs from Ul. “The same as the elderly astrologer, the gloomy unsociable person with an umbrella, and the respected-by-law criminal with fingers like sausages. But earlier we didn’t deal with these. It means they’re recruiting new warlocks. Expanding the reserves of the forts,” Ul instantly answered. Yara stopped chewing. “What? You knew?” “It was simple to guess. Athanasius took the picture of the lighting guy. Then showed me the scratch on his jacket. He maintains: they fired at him from a schnepper,” 2 said Ul.
2
A pistol crossbow.
“I wish they were vampires,” Yara sighed. “In your dreams. If they were vampires, the problem would be solved in a week with the strength of forty-fifty people. Or could appeal to the Vends. 3 But they aren’t vampires, and there’s nothing more to say,” Ul cut her off.
He went out first and stopped on the porch to wait for Yara. Suddenly huge hands grabbed him and lifted him up off the floor. Ul was dangling with his head down and contemplating the wide-mouthed essence in an unbuttoned sheepskin coat. By the porch, a giant of three-and-a-half meters in height was standing unsteadily. This was a living attraction, an incident, animated by one of the founding fathers of HDive. In the daytime it hid in the Green Labyrinth, at night it trampled around HDive. Several times girls that had disappeared were found in its stomach, once even Kuzepych himself.
3
“Vend” is an abbreviation and will be explained in Chapter 6.
“I am Gorshenya, clay head, hungry belly! I’ll eat you!” the giant informed him. He pronounced the words slowly and thoughtfully. “You’ll choke! Let me run up and jump!” proposed Ul. Gorshenya chewed on this thought for a while and then unclenched its hands. Ul’s head stuck in a snowdrift. Gorshenya took a step back and trustingly opened its enormous mouth. Four hundred years in a row it had fallen for one and the same trick.
The snow thawed in the night and shaped well. Ul rolled a snowball and threw it into Gorshenya’s mouth. When Gorshenya was standing with mouth open it saw nothing, because the two amber buttons, which served as its eyes, were thrown back together with the upper half of the head. Gorshenya slammed shut its mouth. “Perhaps I did not eat you?” “You ate my brother. And you’re not supposed to eat two brothers in one day.” said Ul. Gorshenya was saddened.
Yara came out onto the porch. Gorshenya stretched its hand out to her, but Ul slapped it on the fingers. “She doesn’t taste good,” he whispered, “but she has a tasty sister. She went that a way!” Gorshenya, waddling, limped off to search for the sister. “Poor dear! It believes everything,” Ul leniently said. “We’re the poor ones, believing nothing,” remarked Yara. “They say it buried treasure somewhere, and now it’s guarding it,” recalled Ul. The body warmed in the night was lazy. Ul generously scooped up snow and, snorting, washed himself. Melted water flowed down his collar. After understanding that whining would only make it worse, his body put up with it and agreed to be cheerful.
The scattering of stars drew a path to Moscow. From here, the vicinities of Moscow, the city was not discernible, but on a clear day it was possible to climb up the high pine tree and, from the “robber’s lookout” hammered together from boards, see a bright flat spot. That was Moscow. The path was covered. It could only be surmised by the lantern posts and the long snowdrifts, from which projected the humps of park benches. In the huge hdiver jacket, Yara seemed deceptively plump. Ul teasingly called her Winnie the Pooh. Staying on the main path, they reached the place where old oaks outlined a proper oval shape. Yara extracted a boot from the snowdrift and… placed it already on green grass.
Edged with stones, slender straight cypresses stretched to the sky. A climbing rose weaved itself around the iron arches. The lower part of its stem was the thickness of a kid’s hand. Stripping the petals, the wind carried them beyond the invisible boundary and dropped them onto the snow. It seemed to Ul that the snow was stained by blood, but to Yara the snow had been kissed. Yara looked around. The boundary of snow and grass was designated very clearly. Two distant oaks dozed in the snow, but a third, finding itself inside the boundary, did not even know that winter was somewhere beside it.
This oak was Yara’s favourite. She embraced the warm tree and pressed her cheek to it. Ul had noticed long ago how much skin and hands could tell Yara. Now she caressed the bark. Felt it not only with her palms, but also the back of her hand, her nails, and her wrists. She took in the tree with all its bends with the greediness of the blind, gaining a new sense instead of sight. Somehow she acknowledged to Ul that she would want to scratch her hand down to the nerves so that the sensations would intensify. “It happens,” said Ul.
Now he was standing beside her, chewing on a blade of grass and admiring Yara like a technician admiring a female humanist who does not remember what an integral is but willingly discusses the historical fates of peoples. The difference between Yara and Ul was approximately the same as that between a two-handed sword and a nervous foil. He respected her mind and sensitivity; she respected his determination and the ability to grasp the essence of anything without being distracted by details.
“You want to hide the newest tank from the female spy, place a nest with chickens on its motor,” remarked Ul. Practical things interested Ul greatly. He knew that somewhere here the most powerful marker was hidden from the day of the founding of HDive. This was what warmed the earth thoroughly and gave trees the life force. Now Ul for the umpteenth time gauged where the marker was hidden and what would be its size. Its power was colossal. Not a single one of those markers that Ul himself extracted could melt snow for more than five-six steps.
In front of Ul, creaking slightly from time to time, a huge pine tree, similar to a sail and with a flat top, was swinging from the wind. Among its roots was a blue beehive, along the roof of which lazily crept morning bees yet not thoroughly warmed by the sun. From the pine tree began the extensive Green Labyrinth – a carefully pruned mix of acacia, laurel, juniper, and boxwood. In the centre of the Labyrinth was the fountain – an enormous split stone with a whimsical crack, along which water flowed.