"Gordon R. Dickson - Dragon Knight 04 - The Dragon At War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

certainly not make matters worse concerning AngieтАЩs reaction to his delayed homecoming.
He had his arms half-filled with lengths of twig with blossoms on them-for the flowers grew on a sort of
bush, rather than individually-when he was interrupted by a bubbling sound from the lake before him.
Lifting his eyes from the flowers, he suddenly froze in position.
The water in the center of the pond was disturbed. It was mounding upward into large water bubbles
that finally burst and let a round shape poke through. The round shape grew and grew and grew...
Jim stared. Because it seemed that the round shape would never stop growing. Finally, it emerged to the
point of revealing itself as ten feet across; and looked like nothing so much as short, wet, blond hair
plastered to an enormous round skull.
It continued to come up; rising until it revealed a huge forehead, a pair of rather innocent-looking blue
eyes under thick blond eyebrows, a massive nose and an even more massive mouth and jaw-a face that
would have been heavy-boned even if it had been the face of a man of normal size. But what it was, in
fact, was the face of an incredible giant. If the head was any indication, the whole person to whom it
belonged must be nearly a hundred feet in height; and Jim would have guessed, from his acquaintance
with such small lakes as this, that the water in it was nowhere deeper than eight feet.
Jim had no time to speculate on this, however, because just then the head began to forge toward him
with its chin just above water; creating a considerable bow wave with a muscular neck thoroughly in
proportion with the head. The bow wave ran ahead, leaped the margin of the lake, and splashed Jim to
the knees. Meanwhile, more and more of the body belonging to the face had risen above the water to
reveal a giant not as tall, but even more remarkable than Jim had expected.
Towering, this monster eventually stepped out on to the margin of the lake, to stand dripping, and staring
down at Jim. JimтАЩs estimate had indeed been wrong. Thirty feet was more like the actual height of this
stranger.
Giant as he was, he still seemed perfectly human in every other respect. He wore some sort of massive
piece of gray-colored hide, or skin with no fur on it. This hung from one shoulder, dropping to his knees
and wrapped around him in the fashion of TarzanтАЩs clothing in old movies. Or, thought Jim a little wildly,
the way cavemen were normally pictured as being dressed in animal skins.
But there were two differences between this and a caveman. No, three. The first was his enormous size.
The second was that he was apparently as at home on the land and breathing air as he presumably had
been under the lake and breathing water. But the third was the most amazing of all. The man, or
creature, or whatever he was, tapered downward.
In short, below that enormous head he had a relatively narrow, by giant standards, pair of shoulders, and
a chest only slightly smaller in proportion to the shoulders. But he continued to taper on downward from
there, until he ended up in feet that were probably no more than four times as large as JimтАЩs.
The same could not be said of his hands, which looked not merely large enough to be buckets for a
derrick, but to seem capable of picking up a derrick itself in each fist.
тАЬWait!тАЭ boomed the giant. Or at least that was what Jim thought he heard.
тАЬWait?тАЭ echoed Jim, startled into speech. тАЬWhat for... ?тАЭ
Then he realized, out of his earlier years in the twentieth century when he had been an associate teacher
at Riveroak in the English department, that what he had just heard was not тАЬwait.тАЭ He was being
addressed in Old English; and what he had actually heard was тАЬHwaet!тАЭ
The only reason he made this identification with his whirling mind was because that same word happened
to be the first one in the Old English poem of Beowulf, created some fourteen hundred years before JimтАЩs
own original time, on his own world.
He tried to remember what тАЬHwaetтАЭ meant-evidently it was some form of greeting or call to
attention-but he was too bewildered at the moment to fish up any of the Old English he had once
painfully learned. It was a shock to be addressed so, here on this world; where up until now every
human being, and those of the animals who also inexplicably talked, including the dragons, spoke the
same tongue.