Читать книгу Draca - Geoffrey Gudgion - Страница 19

Jack rested his hand on the top of the figurehead, wondering what his grandfather had discovered, and why the carving had become so important to him. Jack hadn ’ t sailed in Draca many times since Grandpa fitted it. By the time he came back from his first, long deployment, to Afghanistan, Draca was laid up. But he remembered going out with Grandpa once, just before he deployed, and seeing the dragon ’ s scaly head snarling down and out at the ocean for the first time. Grandpa ’ s hands were already troubling him , and he let Jack do most of the sailing, but he took the helm for a while and sent Jack forward to watch that carved head soar over the sea. ‘ Look at it, ’ Grandpa had said, eyes shining, ‘ it ’ s happy. The dragon ’ s happy! ’ So Jack braced himself against the forestay , with the boat heeling over and the foresails swelling in the wind beside him, and looked down. As if to prove a point, the ship put her shoulder into a trough so that the sea came in green around his legs, and the dragon rose with water streaming from that gaping jaw as if it had just eaten the wave. Yes, he could persuade himself that the dragon was happy, in a brutal, in-your-face kind of way.

He ’ d heard that Grandpa ’ s sailing style grew more aggressive after that. It cost him a few friends.

And on the day that Grandpa died Jack let his fingers trace the scales on the dragon ’ s head while he stared at the view, drowsy with wine, remembering the loving sea dog rather than the mad old man of recent weeks. The garden was in shadow now the sun had dropped behind the hills, though it still turned the yachts and far shore into sharp and dazzling colours. When Jack was a boy, Grandpa had read him stories on this seat. Sea stories. Sagas. Once he ’ d read Jack a saga in Old Norse, just to let him hear the music of the ancient, Viking tongue. He ’ d read poems of the sea with the passion of an orator in his voice, and he ’ d given Jack his love of books. That evening the old hull ticked with minute contractions of the wood as it cooled. It was a friendly, whispering sound that eased Jack into sleep with the memory of companionable silences on this seat.