"Jude Fisher - Fool's Gold 02 - Wild Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fisher Jude)

boat, avid for every detail. There were ships everywhere? merchant ships,
wide-bellied and short-ribbed; knarrs and longships and fishing vessels.
They rowed so close to the Sur's Raven, the King of Eyra's own ship, that
she was able, by leaning out as far as she could and with Halli holding her
legs and the rest of the crew egging her on, to brush the very tips of her
fingers against its elegant strakes. "It's so beautiful!" she cried, looking
back at the swell of its bow, the clean lines of the stempost, the roaring
dragon's head.
A moment later they passed a ship of oak so dark and weathered it was
almost black. Its stempost boasted an ugly figurehead, roughly carved and
of grim aspect, a great round head of no recognizable creature on Elda,
mouth wide open as if to devour the world. Katla stared at it, fascinated.
As they skimmed past it, the moonlight struck the single lump of glass
that had been set as its eye, and a memory clicked into place. A moment
later, she cried out: "It's the Troll of Narth!"
Everyone laughed good-naturedly at her wild enthusiasm: many of them
were Halbo-born and bred, and none but Katla first-time visitors. They
had seen the Troll a hundred times and more. It was a way station, a
landmark, a dull piece of ancient history.
Katla, however, was transported back to winter firesides and her
father's tales of the old war, the war before the one he had fought in, the
one in which his grandfather had been killed. Those times and their
artifacts had taken on almost legendary status for Katla. While the other
females in the steading had put their hands over their ears and groaned at
the bloodthirsty tales that Aran Aranson told, Katla had been enraptured.
She stared back at the great black hulk. So this was the ship in which
Ravn's grandfather, King Sten, had escaped from the Battle of Horn Bay
by sheer brio and superior seamanship, outrunning a dozen Eyran vessels
which had been captured by the enemy and were now crewed by
mercenaries and slaves under Istrian command. The Troll was already an
ancient ship then, but Sten had worked on it all his life and he knew every
vibration of its rudder, every gradation in the tension of its lines and sheet
and so, confident in his knowledge of his ship and on home territory, he
had steered a dangerous course right through the middle of the Bitches,
that treacherous range of reefs that lie like sharks' teeth off the eastern
coast. Eight of the pursuing ships, sure of their prize, had come straight
after him; six had foundered on the invisible rocks. The remaining six,
surrounded by chaos, had altered course and lost the wind, and by the
time they had found it again, the Troll was gone, vanished into the
labyrinth of islands up the coast. Sten had rejoined his fleet off Wolf's Ness
and together they had turned back and fallen upon the Istrians in their
borrowed ships. It was a short battle, for the enemy were outnumbered
and at a loss in these tricky waters. Forced to choose between the Bitches
and the mercy of the northern king, many Istrians made the fatal error of
choosing the latter; for although Sten ordered that the survivors be saved
and taken back to Halbo, it was only the slaves he freed, and they had
wept with gratitude. Many had stayed in Eyra, for there was nothing
awaiting them in the south, and worked on farms and in nobles' houses
until they could afford their own piece of land. Many took ship to the
Eastern Isles where land was cheap, which accounted for the