"Michael Jan Friedman - The Seekers and the Sword" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friedman Michael Jan)

worlds, my lords, for Odin had built the gatesтАФthe
nether-paths from world to worldтАФfor conquest and for
adventure, for the gathering of wisdom and the spread-
ing of his empire.

But always the Aesir returned to their city by the
sea, for Asgard's splendor cannot bear description....

Sin Skolding
Hiesey, A.D. 439
II

The sun was on his face, drawing his skin tight over his
ageless skull. The wind lifted his hair and ruffled his beard.
He closed his eyes and, for a moment at least, he dreamed.

Once, men had burned pieces of sheep and wild boar on
his altar. They had labored to cut his name into the
runestones that they erected in their burial grounds. They
had collected the scraps of coarse leather left over when
they made their foot coverings, and kept them safeтАФfor it
and was said that out of such bits and pieces his boots had
been made.

And without those boots, the legends said, he could not
have split the wolf Fenrir's jaw.

Men had held him high, as if he were a god. Him and his
kinsmen, the Aesir, who had plucked the sturdiest fighters
from men's midstтАФthen bid them wage an eerie war
against hulking hrimthursar, in a land where the sun
brought no warmth, and there was no wind that did not

MICHAEL JAN PRIEDMAN

sear the skin. They fought gladly, men did, for they
thought that they were in Heaven.

But what did the Aesir hold high? Only Asgard,
He opened his eyes, slowly.

And it was Asgard that rose beneath him now like so
many fountains of stone, achingly graceful in their ascent,
glistening like molten silver in the soft light of the early
spring sun. The water that girded the city on two sides was
alive with whitecaps and deep blue, like the sky when the
air is clear and the day is nearly spent. Mountains stood
guard on her north side, shrugging off waterfalls, and only
in the west was she undefendedтАФopen to a wide plain
called Idavollr.