"Harry Harrison - Hammer Cross 2 - One King's Way" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

day of
greatest portent. A royal union was taking place today. Filling the pews were
the military
aristocracy of Wessex, every alderman, thane, and high-reeve who could
possibly be
squeezed within the stone walls, gaping and sweating, a low mutter of
explanation and
translation continually rising from them, watching intently as the whole
elaborate ritual of
coronation of a Christian king unrolled its stately dance.
In the right-hand pew at the very front of the nave of the great Minster at
Winchester
was Shef Sigvarthsson, co-king of the English—and king in his own right of all
those parts
of it north of the Thames which he could persuade into obedience. He sat
uneasily, aware
of the many eyes on him.
They saw a man whose age was hard to guess. His thick dark hair and smooth-
shaven
face made him seem young, too young for the gold circlet of royalty on his
brow and the
heavy bracelets on both arms. He had the height and the broad shoulders of a
warrior in his
prime—or of an ironsmith, which was what he had been. Yet for all his youth
the dark hair
was already streaked with white, and his face showed the betraying grooves of
care and
pain. His right eye-socket was an empty hollow, and the patch that covered it
could not
disguise the way the flesh had drawn and fallen in. The whole of England and
half of
Europe beyond knew how he had been half-blinded on the order of Sigurth Snake-
eye,
eldest of the sons of Ragnar. And how the smith's apprentice had taken his
revenge by
killing Sigurth's brother, Ivar the Boneless, Champion of the North, rising
from near-thrall
to carl of the Viking Great Army, to jarl under the orders of Alfred Atheling.
Now to being
king and co-ruler with Alfred himself, joint victors over the Frankish Crusade
only the year
before. Rumors ran everywhere about the meaning of the strange sign he wore
round his
neck as emblem of the Asgarth Way, an emblem none had worn before him: the
kraki, the
pole-ladder of the mysterious deity Rig.
Shef had no wish to see the coronation, still less the ceremony that would
follow. The
grooves of pain deepened in his face as he watched. Yet he understood why he
had to be