"Henry Kuttner - We Guard the Black Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

haven't much time, if your ship blasts off tomorrow. What port? Newark?
Well—what about food?"

"I ate on the ferry, Dad—" I seldom called him that.

He moved his big shoulders uneasily. "Let's have a drink." He summoned the
servant, and presently there were highballs before us. I could not repress the
thought that whiskey was incongruous; in the Hall we should have drunk ale
from horns. Well, that was the past. A dead past now.
Nils seemed to read my thought. "The old things linger somehow, Arn. They come
down to us in our blood. So—"

"Waes had," I said.

"Drinc hael." He drained the glass. Knots of muscle bunched at the corners of
his jaw. With a sudden, furious motion, he cast off the gerfalcon, the leash
slipping through the jesses. Freya took to the air with a hoarse, screaming
cry.

"The instinct of flight is in our race," Nils said. "To be free, to fight, and
to fly. In the old days we went Viking because of that. Leif the Lucky sailed
to Greenland; our ships went down past the Tin Isles to Rome and Byzantium; we
sailed even to Cathay. In the winter we caulked our keels and sharpened our
swords. Then, when the ice broke up hi the fjords, the red sails lifted again.
Ran called us—Ran of the seas, goddess of the unknown."

His voice changed; he quoted softly from an old poet.

What is woman that you forsake her,

And the hearthstone, and the home-acre,

To go -with the old gray Widow-maker ....

"Aye," said Nils Esterling, a lost sickness in his eyes. "Our race cannot be
prisoned, or it dies. And 7 have been prisoned for forty years. By all the
hells of all the worlds!" he whispered, his voice shaking. "A most damnable
prison! My soul turned rotten before I'd been back on earth a week. Even
before that. And there was no way out of my prison; I locked it with my own
hands, and broke the key.

"You never knew about that, Arn. You'll know now. There's a reason why I must
tell you—"

He told me, while the slow night came down, and the bo-realis flamed and shook
like spears of light in the polar sky. The Frost Giants were on the march, for
a sudden chill blew in from the fjord. Overhead the wind screamed, like the
trumpet cries of Valkyries.

Far beneath us surged the sea, moving with its sliding, resistless motion,