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

Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Thrall Chapter One
NORTHEAST COAST OF ENGLAND, A.D. 865
Spring. A spring dawn on Flamborough Head, where the rock of the Yorkshire
Wolds juts
out into the North Sea like a gigantic fishhook, millions of tons in weight.
Pointing out to
sea, pointing to the ever-present threat of the Vikings. Now the kings of the
little kingdoms
were uneasily beginning to draw together against this threat from the North.
Uneasy and
jealous, remembering the long hostilities and the trail of murder that had
marked the history
of the Angles and the Saxons ever since they came here centuries ago. Proud
warsmiths
who overcame the Welsh, noble warriors whoтАФas the poets sayтАФobtained the land.
Godwin the Thane cursed to himself as he paced the wooden palisade of the
little fort
erected on the very tip of Flamborough Head itself. Spring! Maybe in more
fortunate parts
the lengthening days and the light evenings meant greenery and buttercups and
heavyuddered
cows trooping to the byres to be milked. Here on the Head it meant wind. It
meant
the equinoctial gale s and the nor'easter blowing. Behind him the low, gnarled
trees stood in
line, one behind the other like men with their backs turned, each successive
one a few
inches higher than the one to windward, so that they formed natural wind-
arrows or
weathercocks, pointing out to the tormented sea. On three sides all round him
the gray
water heaved slowly like an immense animal, the waves starting to curl and
then flattening
out again as the wind tore at them, beating them down and levelling out even
the massive
surges of the ocean. Gray sea, gray sky, squalls blotting the horizon, no
color in the world
at all except when the rollers finally crashed into the striated walls of the
cliffs, shattering