nvs1408: переводы

→Sigurd struggled not to glare at Hagal then for adding his own lustre to it. Nine days? Was six days not enough then, skald? Mind you, Crow-Song had once boasted of reciting an old story for two days and nights straight and remembering every piece of it. Hagal felt the same way about stretching the truth of a thing as a woman felt about stretching the dough to make more bread.

→Now they came to the rock pools and the streams that converged at the cliff’s edge to hurl themselves in a seething white fury down its craggy face.

→Moving through the undergrowth, its hide too thick for the biting insects to penetrate, the boar searches for its treats. Even those which are undergound are not safe and will be rooted up. All the world is to be plundered and feasted upon and now the beast sniffed the air and turned its massive head towards Sigurd. Its eyes flamed and it charged, snapping branches, flying across the earth, fearless and fast, and Sigurd knew that nothing could turn it aside. That bristling fury would hit him like a forge hammer, those tusks ripping into the big muscles of his legs. But the boar blurred past him, the wind from it stinging his side below the ribs, and the creature flew into the scrub beside him and was gone.

→Black Floki slashed a man’s neck and Sigurd felt a slap of hot blood across his face as he turned to take the shield which Hagal offered him. An arrow thumped into the deck behind him closely followed by another.

→Aslak speared the first one, gashing open his face the very moment it appeared above Sea-Sow’s sheer strake, and the man shrieked as he fell away.

→‘It is the kind of fjord you think of when men tell their stories of the old times,’ Svein said, ‘when heroes fought trolls and Thór came down from Valhöll to brain great serpents with his hammer.’

→And though there was only a breath of wind, barely enough to push them along at more than a walking pace, no one complained. For that breath was like a god’s whisper and every man felt it on the back of his neck.

→No one disagreed with that, their eyes round and glutted yet still unable to drink it all in. Protected from the day’s northerly breeze the water was calm enough that ducks bobbed in lines in the shadows of the cliffs and every jumping fish made great moving rings that your eyes could follow for fifty feet or more. Hendil observed that you didn’t need to crane your neck if you were clever about it, for rock and sky were reflected upon the still water in such perfection that a drunken man might think he could step over the knörr’s side and not get his shoes wet.

→‘It is a wonder you survived,’ Guthorm said. ‘Nine days hanging in a tree? It is the stuff of fireside tales. I am sure Hagal has already begun the weave of it.’

→Still, at least he would know now that Sigurd had thought as deeply as any man could about this idea of taking revenge on those who had betrayed his father. Furthermore, his having hung himself on that tree and survived showed that he was either Óðin-favoured or had an iron will, which were both good things to know about a man. It would make Guthorm at least wonder if the Allfather really was turning his one eye towards Sigurd and his blood feud.

→‘What have they come for, is what I am asking myself,’ Eid put in.

→This was almost an insult but Sigurd let it go. Besides which, there was probably some truth in it, for though the in-gathering, as the last harvest of the year and a time to prepare for the long winter months, was a time of some celebration, it was a pale shadow compared with the Midwinter feast, when folk drank enough ale and mead to float a longship.

→‘Sigurd!’ someone yelled and he spun to see a wild-eyed man with an axe coming for his head but got his shield across just in time, the axe head splitting the limewood just above his arm. Sigurd threw the shield arm wide and rammed his spear into the man’s gut even as Svein roared and swung his long-hafted axe, whose blade scythed straight through the man’s back, all but cutting him in half before embedding in Sea-Sow’s deck planks.

→Neither was there any breeze to be found in the cove and so they had to get the oars out at bow and stern and give Sea-Sow enough encouragement to beach up on the shingle, which was only twice as wide as the knörr was long.

→‘Still, it was not so difficult after all,’ Hendil said, which was the way with Hendil, he always saw the sun through the clouds and thought things would turn out well.

→‘Only a troll would live in a place like this,’ Aslak moaned, wrapping his cloak around him for it was suddenly cold as Sea-Sow slipped between two towering cliffs into the sheltered hollow where the water looked black.

→No one could disagree with that and so now they came into a small cove that would have been shadow-shrouded even on a sunny day, but on a day like this, with the rain hammering down, was a gloom-filled hole.

→‘Which is all well and good so long as there is not a bloody great horde of them,’ Olaf put in, ‘for it does not make sense to lose three or four of us whilst looking for just two brothers.’

→When Aslak came back with the drinking horn he gave it to Sigurd who gave it to the old man. It was not the finest thing any of them had ever seen but it was well polished and mounted with silver at the rim. The terminal fitting had perhaps been silver once too but now it was pewter, and the old man made a show of noticing the replacement.

→‘There are quicker ways to get the truth from him,’ Black Floki said, his first words that day. He stood there with two short axes in his belt, a scramasax above his groin, a sword scabbarded at his left hip and a spear in his right hand.