"Karl Edward Wagner - In the Wake of the Nught" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wagner Karl Edward)

Prologue

How long the ship had lain there, no man could say. A century?
For the ship was there when man first came to this shore. Perhaps it was
there when man fled the flaming death of Eden. It may have been there at the
moment of man’s birth. Or long before.
Perhaps a thousand years.
The ship.
Like some unthinkably huge sea monster the ship rested against t.he shore.
For the span of a thousand feet it was the shore—a curving black cliff that
rose from the sand, ten times the height of a tall man.
A dead leviathan cast forth by the sea. No grave could hold a corpse so
vast. Perhaps it was too huge to decay. Not the rotting hand of time, not the
scouring brush of waves and sand, not the searing breath of the wind could
erode the immovable strength of its black shell.
Perhaps the leviathan only rested.
But its sleep was as great as its size, for the ship had rested throughout
the memory of man.
The first men to sight it had crept into its shadow on legs tense with
awestricken fear. Minds inured to the marvels of the Earth’s elder races were
nonetheless stirred with wonder at the silent giant. Might it not awaken and
devour them, or in its slumber roll and crush them?
No. It was dead. A great wound gouged through its back. Sand and seadrift
filled its belly. It must lie here in death.
And the men passed by and left the ship on its bier of sand—wreathed in
seaweed, shrouded in spray. A hundred miles down the coast men raised a
village upon the broken ruins of prehuman dream; the village grew into a city
and men called it Carsultyal. But the ship remained, vast and lonely— for few
cared to disturb its ghost.
If, indeed, it was dead.

I. Vision

Riders in the surf.
Horses’ hooves smacked against the wet sand—the sound of their passing
swallowed in the roar of the waves. A handful of men, cloaks streaming in the
sea-wind, rounded a point of headland and paused in the shadow of grey cliffs.
“There,” spoke Nays, pointing needlessly.
Kethrid’s breath caught, then hissed unheeded in a long “Ahhh. . .” He
raised his spare frame against his stirrups and gazed intently ahead. His
yellow eyes shone in the morning sun.
Sprawled against the shoreline beyond, the ship resembled some beached whale
of fantastic size. Its ebony hull dwarfed the grey cliffs behind it. Its mass
must be immense, for countless seasons of storms had not been able to force
the ship back against these grey fangs. Instead the ship had stolen the
shoreline from the cliffs, for even in these deep waters the ship lay grounded
immovably some distance offshore. In the shelter of its hull, waves piled up
sand and drift, so that the ship and its bier made a promontory.
“You seized prey too great to swallow,” mused Kethrid aloud. “And now it has