"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 2 - The Fabulous Riverboat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

stern. But it also had a raised foredeck and poopdeck, the
sides of both extending out over the water. The two bam-
boo masts were fore-and-aft rigged. The sails were a very
thin but tough and flexible membrane made from the
stomach of the deep-dwelling "riverdragon" fish. There
was also a rudder controlled by a wheel on the poopdeck.
The round leather-and-oak shields of the crew hung
over the sides; the great oars were piled on racks. The
Dreyrugr was sailing against the wind, tacking back and
forth, a maneuver unknown to the Norsemen when they
had lived on Earth.
The men and women of the crew not handling the ropes
sat on the oarsmen benches and talked and threw dice and
played poker. From below the poopdeck came cries of ex-
citation or curses and an occasional faint click. Bloodaxe
and his bodyguard were shooting pool, and their doing so
at this tune made Clemens very nervous. Bloodaxe knew
that enemy ships three miles up The River were putting
out to intercept them, and ships from both banks behind
them were putting out to trail them. Yet the king was pre-
tending to be very cool. Maybe he was actually as un-
disturbed as Drake had supposedly been just before the
battle of the Great Armada.
"But the conditions are different here," Clemens mut-
tered. "There's not much room to maneuver on a river
only a mile and a half wide. And no storm is going to help
us out."
He swept the bank with the telescope as he had been
doing ever since the fleet set out three years ago. He was
of medium height and had a big head that made his none-
too-broad shoulders look even more narrow. His eyes
were blue; his eyebrows, shaggy; his nose, Roman. His

hair was long and reddish brown. His face was innocent of
the mustache that had been so well known during his ter-
restrial life. (Men had been resurrected without face hair.)
His chest was a sea of brown-red curly hair that lapped at
the hollow of his throat. He wore only a knee-length white
towel secured at the waist, a leather belt for holding
weapons and the sheath for his telescope, and leather slip-
pers. His skin was bronzed by the equatorial sun.
He removed the telescope from his eye to look at the
enemy ships trailing by a mile. As he did so, he saw some-
thing flash in the sky. It was a curving sword of white, ap-
pearing suddenly as if unsheathed from the blue. It
stabbed downward and then was gone behind the moun-
tains.
Sam was startled. He had seen many small meteorites in
the night sky but never a large one. Yet this daytime giant
set his eyes afire and left an afterimage on his eyes for a