"Paul Edwin Zimmer - Ingulf the Mad" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zimmer Paul Edwin)

appeared and vanished behind restless, blue-green waves.


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He was returning to harbor with the few fish he had caught, when a long brown shape skimmed
up the side of a rippling wave.
A seal, he thought, and plied his oars. He was skilled at hunting in the water: he crept up on it and
laid down the oars and gripped his harpoon.
He stiffened, and raised the long straight shaft. The seal balanced on the crest of a wave. Ingulf
rose and threw, and the harpoon flew. It struck further back than he had planned, and the seal
wailed in a woman's voice.
His harpoon line tightened in his hand, and his boat was drawn swiftly through the water. A dip
in the waves showed him the rocks of a stony little island ahead.
The rope hummed. Black, jagged stone pierced the creamy water on either side, but the seal
swam safely through.
Ingulf the Mad 3
dragging the boat behind, toward a tiny gravel beach. A cave gaped in the cliff above.
A wave lifted the seal and laid her gently on the little beach. Ingulf jerked out his long dirk, ready
to leap from the boat; for a seal upon land is easy to kill.
But the brown shape reared up, and the seal-skin seemed to fall away. It was a woman there,
crying and tugging with slender white hands at the harpoon in her hip.
As he stared. Ingulf almost lost his life to the sea. Powerful currents seized the boat and whirled it
toward the rocks. He seized his paddle and drove the pitching boat to shore.
She let go the spear-shaft then, and tried to escape, but felt, with blood pouring over her white
legs.
He leaped from the boat and ran to her side. The ends of the long brown hair that was her only
garment were bright with blood. Huge eyes stared at him in wild terror.
He tried to speak soothingly as he wrestled with the harpoon, working the barb loose. Her pain
would haunt his nightmares forever.
Had it been her long brown hair he had seen in the water, and thought was a seal? It hung below
her waist.
His mind went round and round, numb with guilt. He got the harpoon loose, and she sobbed and
screamed with exhaustion while he tried to stop the blood.
That was the beginning of it all, and terrible it was. He bound up her wound as best he might,
stuttering helpless words of guilt and sorrow, and made her drink from the wineskin that was
slung on his back. She controlled her weeping at last, and gazed at him with eyes that were larger
and softer than the eyes of any woman of mortal blood.
But a strange thing it was, that he could never, afterward remember what color those eyes were.
Sometimes he seemed to remember that they had been gray as the sea at twilight, and then again
they would come into his mind a transparent blue, like the night sky between the stars, or again as
brown as her hair, or sometimes golden. . . .
But whatever color they were, he would see those eyes looking at him for the rest of his days.
4 Paul Edwin Zimmer
He built a fire, and brought from the boat those few fish he had caught, along with his fur-lined
cloak to cover her. The Twin Suns settled into the sea. She ate the fish he cooked, and slept
wrapped in his cloak, while he sat and piled driftwood on the fire until he fell asleep with his
back against the stone.