"Harrison, Harry - Hammer 2 - One King's Way" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

people, in honor of her courage in the defeat of the Franks. So, he had said, after the
donning of the regalia, sword, ring and scepter, he meant his wife to come forward and be
named before the congregation, not as Queen, but as the Lady of Wessex. And who better
to lead her to the altar than her brother, Shef, also his co-king?
Who might have to yield his kingdom to the child of Alfred and the Lady, if he had no
child himself.
This would be the second time he had given her away, Shef thought bitterly. Once
again he must forget the love, the passion that had once bound them. The first had been to a
man they both hated, and in punishment for that, it seemed, he must now hand her over to a
man they both loved. As Thorvin nudged him with a mighty elbow, to tell him the time had
come to step forward and lead the Lady Godive with her train of maidens to the altar, Shef
met her eyes -- her triumphant eyes -- and felt his heart turn to ice.
Alfred might now be a king, he though numbly. He himself was not. He did not have
the right, or the strength.
As the choir broke into the Benedicat he decided that he would do it. Do the thing he
wanted to, not just what he felt was his duty. He would take out the fleet, the new navy of
the co-kings, to work out his inner anger on the enemies of the realm: the pirates of the
North, the fleets of the Franks, the slavers of Ireland or Spain, anyone. Let Alfred and
Godive find their own happiness at home. He would find peace in drowned men and
shattered ships.
Earlier this same day, far to the north in the land of the Danes, a simpler and more
terrifying ceremony had taken place.
It had begun before dawn. The bound man lifted from where he lay on the floor of the
guard- hut had long since ceased to struggle, though he was neither a coward nor a
weakling. Two days before, when the emissaries of the Snake-eye had marched into the
slave-pen, he had known what would be in store for the man they chose. When they picked him from the others, he had known also that the least chance of escape was to be seized,
and he had seized it: secretly gathered the slack in his wrist-chains as they marched him off,
waited till the guards were hustling him over the wooden bridge that led to the inner heart
of the Braethraborg, the stronghold of the three last sons of Ragnar. Then struck suddenly
to his right with the chain, and hurled himself for the rail and the swift river beneath it -- at
the best to swim for freedom, at the worst to die his own man.
His guards had seen many such desperate attempts. One snatched at his ankle as he
lunged for the rail, two others had him pinned before he could recover. They had beaten
him systematically with their spear-shafts, not in malice, but to ensure he would be too stiff
and battered to move swiftly again. Then taken off the chains and replaced them with
rawhide thongs, twisting and wetting them with sea-water to dry even tighter. If the bound
man could have seen his fingers in the dark, they would have been blue-black, swollen like
a corpse's. Even if some god intervened to save his life, it wo uld be too late now to save his
hands.
But neither god nor man would intervene. The guards had ceased to acknowledge his
existence when they talked among themselves. He was not dead, because for what he had to
do a man was needed with the breath, and especially the blood, still in him. But that was
all. There was no need for anything else.
Now, at the end of the long night, his guards carried him out of the longhouse where
the great fresh-tarred flagship lay, and down the long row of rollers that led down the
slipway to the sea.
"Here will do. This one here," grunted the burly middle-aged warrior in charge.
"How do we do it?" asked one of the others, a young man without the campaignmarks,
the scars and silver arm-rings of the others. "I've never seen this done before."
"So watch and you'll learn. First, cut that rawhide round his wrists. No, don't worry,"