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

scatter. A
dozen armed men just might be useful.
"Come and welcome," he said.
Wulfgar nodded with deliberate satisfaction. "I am only just in time," he
remarked.
Out to sea the penultimate act of the wreck was about to take place. One of
the two
knorrs was fifty yards farther in than the other; her men more tired or maybe
less driven by
their skipper. Now she was about to pay the price. Her wallowing rolls in the
waves
changed angle, the bare mast rocking crazily. Suddenly the watching men could
see that the
yellow line of underwater sandbanks was the other side of the hull. Crewmen
exploded
from the deck and the planks where they had been lying, ran furiously up and
down,
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 dayтАФlike 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