"Harrison, Harry - Hammer 1 - The Hammer and the Cross" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

grabbing sweeps, thrusting them over the side, trying to pole their ship off and gain a few
extra moments of life.
Too late. A cry of despair rang thinly across the water as the Vikings saw it, echoed by
a hum of excitement from the Englishmen on the shore: the wave, the big wave, the seventh
wave that always rolls farthest up the beach. Suddenly the knorr was up on it, lifted and
tilted sideways in a cascade of boxes and barrels and men sliding from the windward into
the leeward scuppers. Then the wave was gone and the knorr smashed down, landing with a
thump on the hard sand and grave l of the bank. Planks flew, the mast was over the side in a
tangle of cordage; for an instant a man could be seen grasping desperately to the
ornamented dragon-prow. Then another wave covered everything, and when it passed there
were only bobbing fragments.
The fishermen nodded. A few crossed themselves. If the good God spared them from
the Vikings, that was the way they expected to go one day -- like men, with the cold salt in
their mouths, and rings in their ears to pay kindly strangers to bury them. Now, there was
one more thing for a skillful captain to try.
The remaining Viking was going to try it, to scud south with the wind abeam and all
the easting he could get, rather than wait passively for death like his consort had. A man
appeared suddenly at the steering oar. Even from two furlongs' distance the watchers could
see his red beard wagging as he bellowed orders, could hear the echo of his urgency rolling
across the water. There were men at the ropes, waiting, heaving together. A scrap of sail
leapt free from the yard, caught instantly by the wind and tugged out. As the ship shot
urgently towards shore another volley of orders swung the yard round and the boat heeled
downwind. Within seconds she was steady on a new course, picking up speed, throwing
water wide from her bow-wave as she raced away from the Head down toward the Spurn.
"They're getting away!" yelled Godwin. "Get the horses!" He cuffed his groom out of
the way, scrambled astride, and set off at a gallop in pursuit, Wulfgar, the stranger thane,
only a pace or two behind, and the rest of their retinues following in strung-out, disorderly
lines. Only the dark boy who had come with Wulfgar hesitated.
"You're not hurrying," he said to the motionless reeve. "Why not? Don't you want to
catch up with them?" The reeve grinned, stooped, picked a pinch of sand from the beach and threw it in the
air. "They've got to try it," he remarked. "Nothing else to do. But they're not going to get
far."
Turning on his heel he indicated a score of men to stay where they were and watch the
beach for wreckage or survivors. Another score of mounted men set off along the path
behind the thanes. The rest, bunched together, began to trot purposefully but deliberately
along the beach after the racing ship.
As the minutes passed even the landsmen realized what the reeve had seen straight
away. The Viking skipper was not going to win his gamble. Twice already he had tried to
force his ship's head out to sea, two men joining the red-bearded one as he strained at the
steering oar, the rest of the crew bracing the yard round till the ropes sang iron- hand in the
wind. Both times the waves had heaved, heaved remorselessly at the prow till it wavered,
swung back, the ship's hull shuddering with the forces contending on it. And again the
skipper had tried, turning back parallel with the coastline and building up speed for another
dash to the safety of the open sea.
But was he parallel with the coastline this time? Even to the inexperienced eyes of
Godwin and Wulfgar it looked this time as if something was different: stronger wind,
heavier sea, the grip of the inshore current dragging at the bottom. The red-bearded man
was still by the oar, still shouting orders for some other maneuver, the ship was still racing
along, as the poets said, like a foamy-necked floater, but her prow was turning in inch by
inch or foot by foot; the yellow line was perilously close to her bow-wave, it was clear she