"Harry Harrison - Hammer-Cross 3 - King And Emperor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

of their neighbors easily. They could afford to. For whatever its history, whatever its native merit or lack
of it, Stamford was now chief residence of the King of the North, once a co-king, once a jarl, before that
a mere carl of the Great Army now destroyed, before that, almost, a thrall in a fenland village. Now they
called him the One King, for so he had proved himself, and to his name and title, King Shef, his Norse
subjects added the nick-nameSigrsaell , his English ones, with the same meaning and in almost the same
wordSigesaelig : the Victorious. Truly he was a king who ruled by his word alone. If he declared humble
Stamford the Capital of the North, then so it must be.

After his now-legendary defeat of the Ragnarsson brothers in the great battle of the Braethraborg in the
year 868 of the Christians' count, that itself following on his defeat of the King of the Swedes in single
combat at the Kingdom Oak of Uppsala, Shef the One King had received the submission of all the petty
kings of the Scandinavian lands, of Denmark, Sweden and Norway as well. His fleets filled by levies
from his under-kings, prominent among them Olaf of Norway and his own comrade Guthmund of
Sweden, he had returned with massive force to the island of Britain, regaining power not only over the
kingdom of the East and Middle Angles which he had been granted previously, but rapidly overawing
also the petty rulers of Northumbria and the southern shires, and after them exacting submission further
from the Scots, the Picts and Welsh. In the year 869 King Shef had launched the great circumnavigation
of the island of Britain, which set out from the port of London, cruised to the north along the English and
Scottish coasts, descended like a cloud on the disbelieving pirate-jarls of the Orkneys and Shetlands, left
them chastened and afraid, and then turned south and west again through the many islands of the Scots
and down the lawless western coasts to Land's End itself. Only there did it recognize friendly power,
sheathe its talons, and sail east in company with the escort-ships of Alfred, King of the West Saxons, till
it reached home harbor once more.

Since then the inhabitants of Stamford could boast that they sheltered a king whose power was
uncontested from the westernmost isle of Scilly to the tip of the North Cape itself, two thousand miles
north and east. Uncontested andтАФmost saidтАФshared only in theory with King Alfred, whose narrow
boundaries King Shef persistently continued to honor, in obedience to the agreement of co-kingship the
two had entered into in dark days of threat almost ten years before.

What the inhabitants of Stamford could not say, and did not care to think about, was why the greatest
king the North had known since the times of the Caesars should make his home in the rural mud of
Middle Anglia. The king's advisers had said the same thing, many times. Rule from Winchester, some
said, to be frowned down by an angry one-eyed stare: for Winchester remained the capital of Alfred and
the South. Rule from York, suggested others, from the stone walls that the king himself had stormed.
London, said others, long a wretched backwater without a king or a court to fill it, but now increasingly
the rich center of trade from the fur-lands of the North to the vineyards of the South, crowded with ships
carrying hops, honey, grain, leather, tallow, wool, iron, grindstones and a thousand luxury goods: all
paying toll to the officers of the co-kings, Shef's on the north bank and Alfred's on the south. No, said the
many Danes among his counselors, rule from the ancient stronghold of the Skj├╢ldung kings, from
Hlethraborg itself, for it is the center of your dominions.

The king rejected them all. He would have chosen a town in the fenlands themselves if it had been
possible, for he was a child of the fens. But much of the year Ely stood inaccessible in the swamp, and
Cambridge little better. In Stamford he was at least on the Great North Road of the Romans, now relaid
with hard stone on his own instructions. It was there, he declared, that he would set theWisdom-hus , the
House of Wisdom, that would be the central achievement of his rule: the new College of the
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