"H. Warner Munn - The Ship from Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Munn H Warner)

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The Ship from Atlantis by H.
Warner Munn




I
MERLIN'S GODSON
It was the Year of the Rabbit, in the chronology of Aztlan, and the
day-sign being fortunate a great festival was taking place a few miles
above the spot where the Misconzebe, Grandfather of Rivers, mingles with
the salt waters of the Gulf.

For a month the invited guests had been arriving at Fortress Tollan,
which held the entrance to this broad highway to the north and the rich
lands of Tlapallan. The reeds which gave that district its name were gone,
trampled into the mud by thousands of feet or woven into temporary
shelters by the visitors. The shore was lined with watercraft.
 Hide bull-boats, birch-bark and elm canoes or those carved from a
single log rocked at anchor or lay bottom up until they might be needed.
Decorated in fanciful patterns, they lay in colorful rows near the crowded
city of weik-waums, wickiups and tepees which had sprung up around the
palisade spined, earthen walled fortress. Few of those who had come to
this mightiest of peace councils gave the fleet more than a passing glance.
The novelty was beyond.

Drawn up in the shallows, well fastened against the tugging current, lay
what any Briton would have recognized as a Saxon pirate ship. In this
Year of our Lord 616, they crowded the rivers and estuaries of Britain, but
in Alata, (as North America was known at that time) there was only one.
Built almost twenty years before of stout oak planks, caulked with pitch
and bison hair, it had been well cared for awaiting this moment.

It was seventy-seven feet in length and clinker built. At the prow and
stern the decks were raised. In between, considerably lower, was a partial
main deck or fighting platform, but the rowers' pit was open to the
weather. Here were rowing benches, fifteen to each side, with a gangway
down the center. Rows of wooden shields, emblazoned with the totems of
those young Aztecs who had been chosen to wield the carven oars, were
fastened to the sides to protect them from arrows or waves.

It was a well found ship and it needed to be, for in it the son of the King