"John Dalmas - Yngling 1 - The Yngling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

he had usually been content to parry and counter,
seldom pressing a vigorous attack. Although he
invariably won anyway, the drillmaster had sometimes
thrashed him for this. Now, without ferocity but
overpoweringly, his birch club-sword thrust and
struck like the weapon of a B├дrs├дrk, making his
bruised and abraded ringmates exceed themselves in
sheer self-defense. Their drillmaster, old Matts
Sv├д├дdkunni, grinned widely and often, happier than
anyone could remember. "That is how a Wolf should
fight," he would bellow. And he had a new practice
sword forged for his protege, heavier than any other
in the clan.
Late in September, when the cold weather
came, the sword apprentices butchered cattle,
drinking the steaming blood, smearing each other with
gore and brains, and draping entrails about their
necks and shoulders so they would not be squeamish in
battle. And in late October, after the first heavy
snow, they slipped the upturned toes of their ski
boots under the straps and hunted moose and wild
cattle in the forests and muskegs. After that, as was
customary for sword apprentices, Nils Hammarson
wrapped cheese and meat in his sleeping bag of
glutton skins, took his bow and short sword and went
for days at a time into the rugged,
11
uninhabited hills above Lake Siljan. But now he did
not hunt the wolf, their clan totem, with a ringmate.
In fact he did not hunt so much as travel, northwest
even into the mountains of what tradition called
J├дmtland, where long glaciers filled the valleys. The
great wanderer of the Svear, Sten Vannaren, told that
the ice had moved down the valley more than three
kilometers in five years. Someday, he said, the ice
will reach the sea.
Nils would have liked to have seen the
glaciers in summer when the land was green, but he
expected never to be here again.
Not that he would be executed-struck
down like an ox to have his head raised on a pole at
the ting. The circumstances had not been that
damning. And this belief was not born of hope, nor
did it give rise to hope. It was a simple
dispassionate evaluation that would prove correct or
incorrect, but probably correct.
And if it came down to it, he would
escape. To his knowledge, no one had ever tried to
escape a sentence of the ting. It would be considered
shameful and jeopardize future lifetimes. But Nils