"John Dalmas - Yngling 3 - The Circle of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

Stornäve and Varjsson! You’ve talked with the chiefs of the Seal and Bull
Clans, so they will give you warriors who will mark a new boundary that will
steal our land from us!”
“I see. And you have witnesses to this?”
Jäävklo stood staring wildly at the lagman,
who repeated his unanswered question. “When did you have dealings with Axel
Stornäve before you first asked for a boundary adjustment?”
Jäävklo had no answer; to Ted Baver it seemed
that the man’s eyes bulged.
“You do not answer. Therefore unless
corrected, I will assume that you’d never had dealings with him before. From
what then did this bad blood develop?”
Again there was no answer.
“Each tribe has a law against slander, and the
council a law against lies in its meetings. Men are seldom charged under them
unless the lie is harmful, and I will not charge you now. But . . . ”
His words were cut short by a keening noise
from Jäävklo’s throat, a keening that quickly grew to a howl of rage.
Fumbling, wrenching, the chief tore off his sleeveless leather shirt. The howl
had broken into hoarse, grunting cries, wordless shouts, and when his torso
was bare, he drew his sword and charged the lagman.
Nils Järnhann’s sword was out too, and
blind-eyed he met the man’s berserk assault. The violent energy and quickness
of Jäävklo’s attack was shocking to Baver, who’d never before witnessed an
attack to kill. But the lagman beat off the berserker’s strokes, seemingly
without any effort to strike back; either he was too hard pressed or he
exercised an unexplainable restraint.
Then Jäävklo’s sword broke against the
lagman’s, almost at the hilt. With a howl, he flung the rest of it at his
adversary, then turned and threw himself on the council fire, where he lay
roaring as if in rage, without trying to get up. Staring wide-eyed past his
recorder, Baver shook, twitched, almost spouted sweat, and got half up as if
to run and rescue the man. But didn’t. Instead he continued to record. It
seemed impossible that the Glutton chief had done what he had, and having done
it, that pain did not drive him off.
And that no one pulled him off!
The raucous roaring stopped. Then Baver
doubled over and emptied his stomach onto the ground. When he was done
retching, he settled down onto his knees, staring as the lagman, who’d gone to
the dead Jäävklo, grasped the corpse’s feet and pulled it from the fire. Baver
heard no one else be sick, though surely this horrible, this shocking event
must have traumatized some of them, at least.
Then he remembered the departure of the Orcs*
from the City of Kazi, and what the Northmen found there the next day. And
wondered if after all they might handle this with similar dispassion, might
treat it simply as an unfortunate display of aberration.


*For
those who are interested, a brief pronunciation guide for Neoviking names and