"Simon Hawke - Time Wars 05 - The Nautilus Sanction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

“What happened to your ship?” Hood said gently.
 “Destroyed,” the man said, shutting his eyes. His chest rose and fell unevenly as he breathed
laboriously. “It was the beast,” he said, with a shiver.
Hood frowned. “The Beast? I know of no such ship.”
“A sea beast!” said the man, opening his eyes wide and staring at Hood with the gaze of a lunatic.
“The Covenant was destroyed by a monster from the depths!”
“Monster?” Hood said, glancing at the doctor. “What monster?”
“Perhaps he means a whale, Your Lordship,” said Dr. Graves.
“No!” The man struggled to rise, finally managing to prop himself up slightly on his elbow. “No, not a
whale!” he said, fervently. “A beast, I tell you! A veritable leviathan! A great, horrid, monstrous thing
from the very jaws of hell!”
“Come, man, what nonsense is this?” said Hood. “We are not children to believe in sea dragons.
Even schoolboys know such creatures do not exist.”
“I saw it, I tell you!” said the man, his voice rising. “It churned the sea all round as it thrashed its
mighty tail. It sounded and we heard it scream! I will hear that dreadful sound for all the days and nights
left in my miserable life!”
“The man’s a lubber,” Dr. Graves said. “It must have been a whale he saw.”
“Not this one,” said the first mate, who had helped hold him down. “There’s tar in his hair and those
were good seaman’s knots he lashed himself to the mast with.” He glanced up nervously at Hood. “No
seaman gets himself frightened senseless by a whale, Your Lordship.”
“Lubber, am I?” said the sailor, his voice rising in pitch as he neared hysteria. “Whale, was it? Aye,
you show me the whale that can hole a man-o’-war and then spit fire into its hull! Aye, the very flames of
hell! One instant, there was a mighty ship, the next, there was nought but flaming splinters! The creature
spat at us and we were consumed! Not a man jack left alive to tell the tale save me!”
“The poor man’s daft,” said Dr. Graves. “He’s lost his mind.”
“Aye, call me mad! Any sane man would. But I know what I saw, and I only pray to God I never lay
eyes on it again!”
“Steady, now,” said Hood, bending down close to the man. “You have been through an ordeal
enough to make any man half-mad. Try to remember. Think, could it be that a whale struck your ship or
was struck by it? Perhaps the shock caused a lantern to fall and ignite the powder magazine?”
“I tell you, it was no whale!” the man shouted. “Think you I do not know a whale when I see one?
We thought at first it was a whale when we glimpsed it on the surface, but no whale could swim with
such unholy speed or give vent to such a cry! No whale spits fire at a ship!” He reached out and grasped
the lapels of Hood’s seacoat with shaking hands. “Pray!” he said, his eyes glazing over, staring not at
Hood, but at something else that none of them could see. “Pray you do not cross this creature’s path!
Tell your lookouts to keep watch! Tell your men to keep their eyes upon the sea! If they should sight a
dark shape in the water with a fin very like a shark’s, but larger than any shark that ever swam the ocean,
tell them to make their peace with God! For you can turn your ship; you can put up every foot of sail in
the strongest wind and flee, but it will avail you nought! The hell-spawn swims with a speed beyond
belief! You shall hear its awful cry and it will sound and the sea will roil with its passage!”
The man began to laugh hysterically.
“Aye, a whale, you say. A whale!”
Hood firmly grasped the man’s wrists and pried himself loose from his hold. He stood, watching
sorrowfully as the shipwreck victim alternately laughed and sobbed.
“Do what you can for him, Graves,” he said. “Poor wretch. I fear he is beyond your help.”
“Aye,” said the doctor, shaking his head. “Sea monsters.” The mate looked up at Graves and Hood,
then glanced back down at the shipwreck victim and quickly crossed himself.
Later in the day, they lost him. That evening, Hood himself said the words as they put the poor man’s
weighted body over the side. By then, there was not a man aboard who had not heard the story. When
the Avenger made port, the tale began to spread throughout the pubs of Bristol, a tale of a leviathan that