"Eternal Champion - 05 - The Skrayling Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

days I was a trifle bored, but I refused to become busy. I continued to take a
keen interest in the local wildlife and history.
That Saturday we were sitting on the widow's walk of our roof, looking out over
Cabot Creek and its many small, wooded islands. One of these, little more than a
rock, was submerged at high tide. There, it was said, the local Kakatanawa
Indians had staked enemies to drown.
Our binoculars were Russian and of excellent quality, bought on our final visit
to Ulric's ancestral estate in the days before the Berlin Wall went up. That
afternoon I was able to spot clear details of the individual seals. They were
always either there or about to appear, and I had fallen in love with their
joyous souls. But, as I watched the tide wash over Drowning Rock, the water
suddenly became agitated and erratic. I felt some vague alarm.
The swirl of the sea had a new quality I couldn't identify. There was even a
different note to a light wind from the west. I mentioned it to Ulric. Half
asleep, enjoying his brandy and soda, he smiled. It was the action of Auld
Strom, the avenging hag, he said. Hadn't I read the guide? The Old Woman was the
local English name for the unpredictable bore, a twisting, vicious current which
ran between the dozens of little islands in the Sound and could sometimes turn
into a dangerous whirlpool. The French called her Le Chaudron Noir, the black
cauldron. Small whaling ships had been dragged down in the nineteenth century,
and only a year or two before three vacationing schoolgirls in a canoe had
disappeared into the maelstrom. Neither they nor their canoe had ever been
recovered.
A harder gust of wind brushed against my left cheek. The
surrounding trees whispered and bustled like excited nuns. Then they were still
again.
"It's probably unwise to take a dip tomorrow." Ulric cast thoughtful eyes over
the water. He sometimes seemed, like so many survivors of those times,
profoundly sad. His high-boned, tapering face was as thrillingly handsome as
when I had first seen it, all those years ago in the grounds of his house during
the early Nazi years. Knowing I had planned some activity for the next day he
smiled at me. "Though sailing won't be a problem, if we go the other way. We'd
have to be right out there, almost at the horizon, to be in real danger. See?"
He pointed, and I focused on the distant water which was dark, veined like
living marble and swirling rapidly. "The Old Woman is definitely back in full
fury!" He put his arm around my shoulders. As always I was amused and comforted
by this gesture.
I had already studied the Kakatanawa legend. Le Chaudron was for them the spirit
of all the old women who had ever been murdered by their enemies. Most
Kakatanawa had been driven from their original New York homeland by the
Haudenosaunee, a people famous for their arrogance, puritanism and efficient
orga-nization, whose women not only determined which wars would be fought and
who would lead them, but which prisoners would live and who would be tortured
and eaten. So Auld Strom was a righteously angry creature, especially
hard on females. The Kakatanawa called the conquering Haudenosaunee
'Erekoseh', their word for rattlesnake, and avoided the warriors as
conscientiously as they did their namesakes, for the Erekoseh, or Iroquois as
the French rendered their name, had been the Normans of North America, masters
of a superb new idea, an effective social engine, as pious and self-demanding in
spirit as they were savage in war. Like the vital Romans and Normans, they