"Gordon R. Dickson - Dragon Knight 04 - The Dragon At War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

“I’m-I’m sorry,” he stammered, “but I don’t speak-“
The giant interrupted him, talking now in the same language everyone else did.
“Of course!” he boomed. “Been two thousand years, if me memory serves-or was it three? A long time,
anyhow, since last I was here. The way folk speak was bound to change. No, it’s all right, wee man, I
can also speak the way you little folk do. Easy as that!”
• And he snapped the thumb and middle finger of his right hand together, with a noise like that of a
cannon going off.
Jim shook the ringing out of his ears, and broke out with the first thought that came into his still-stunned
mind. He looked from the inversely pyramidal giant to the lake, which now seemed, by comparison, very
small indeed.
“But-“ he said. “Where’d you come from? How did you get-“
“Lost me way!” boomed the giant, interrupting him again. “Many centuries it is since my last faring hither.
Mislaid me way among the underground waters of this isle.”
Jim’s only thought was that now the other was beginning to sound even more like Beowulf-but Beowulf
translated, with a sort of old-seamanlike flavor.
Standing only a dozen feet apart as they were, Jim had to crane his neck to look up at the giant’s face;
and he got a very foreshortened view of it, even at that. To see the other more fairly, he backed off
about twelve paces.
“Fear not!” boomed the giant. “Know that I am Rrrnlf, a Sea Devil. Call me ‘Ranulf,’ as you wee folk
did the last time I was here. As then, by the Sirens, I mean you and your kind no ill. It’s another I seek.
How do call yourself, lad?”
“I-er-“ Jim, on the verge of introducing himself simply as “Jim Eckert,” caught himself just in time, “am
Sir James Eckert, Baron of Malencontri-“
“Strange names you small folk do have!” rumbled the giant. “Only one ‘R’ and no ‘L’ anywhere.
However, no matter. Whereaway’s the sea?”
Jim pointed westward.
“Ah,” said the Sea Devil with satisfaction, “then I’m lost no longer.” His speech was becoming more
normal with every sentence. “From here I can go anywhere beneath the ground and not be lost again.
But why hold those-whatever they be?”
“Flowers for my wife,” Jim told him.
“She eats flowers?” boomed Rrrnlf, staring.
“Noooo...” said Jim, wondering how to explain himself. “She just likes to keep them-to look at them,
you know.”
“Why doesn’t she come here, then, to get them?” demanded Rrrnlf.
Jim was beginning to get a little annoyed with all this questioning. What blasted business of this
human-shaped mammoth was it anyway about Angie and the flowers?-On the other hand, no point in
making someone his size angry.
“Because she’d rather have them close at hand!” he said.
At the same moment, an idea exploded in his mind like a shower-of-stars rocket on the Fourth of July.
He had been completely forgetting the-admittedly limited-magical ability he had picked up in coming to
this feudal world. What was the use of being able to do magic, if a magician like himself couldn’t use
magic to take care of a little situation like this?
Quickly, he wrote a spell on the inside of his forehead.

MAKE ME AND MY CLOTHES ? SEA DEVIL SIZE
Immediately he found himself looking into the giant’s face on a level. As usual there had been no
particular sensation; but he was now thirty feet or so tall himself and gazing at the other from what
seemed to be only a couple of feet away.
Seen straight on this way by someone the same size, the Sea Devil appeared rather a pleasant-faced, if
still heavy-boned, blond character, with only the shape peculiarity about him, except the intense, deep