"Gordon R. Dickson - Enter a Pilgrim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

Enter a Pilgrim
As John Campbell said, "The only man who makes slavery possible is the slave."

By Gordon R. Dickson

In the square around the bronze statue of the Cymbrian bull, the crowd was silent. The spring sky over
Aalborg, Denmark was high and blue; and on the weather grayed red brick wall of the building before them a
man was dying upon the triple blades, according to an alien law. The two invokers, judges and executioners
of that law sat their riding beats, watching, less than two long paces from where Shane Evert stood among
the crowd of humans on foot.

"My son," the older and bulkier of the two was saying to the younger in the heavy Aalaag tongue, plainly
unaware that there was a human nearby who could understand him, "as I’ve told you repeatedly, no creature
tames overnight. You’ve bee warned that when they travel in a family the male will defend his mate, the
female and male defend their young."

"But, my father," said the younger, "there was no reason. I only struck the female aside with my power-lance
to keep her from being ridden down. It was a consideration I intended, not a discipline or an attack…"

Their words rumbled in Shane’s ears and printed themselves in his mind. Like giants in human form, medieval
and out of place, the two massive Aalaag loomed beside him, the clear sunlight shining on the green and
silver metal of their armor and on the red, camel-like creatures that served them as riding animals. Their
concern was with their conversation and the crowd of humans they supervised in this legal deathwatch. Only
slightly did they pay attention to the man they had hung on the blades.

Mercifully, for himself as well as for the humans forced to witness his death, it happened that the Dane
undergoing execution had been paralyzed by the Aalaag power-lance before he had been thrown upon the
three sharp lengths of metal protruding from the wall twelve feet above the ground. The blades had pierced
him while he was still unconscious; and he had passed immediately into shock. So that he was not now
aware of his own dying; or of his wife, the woman for whom he had incurred the death penalty, who lay dead
at the foot of the wall below him. Now he himself was almost dead. But while he was still alive all those in the
square were required by Aalaag law to observe.

"…Nonetheless," the alien father was replying, "the male misunderstood. And when cattle make errors, the
master is responsible. You are responsible for the death of this one and his female-which had to be, to show
that we are never in error, never to be attacked by those we have conquered. But the responsibility is yours."

Under the bright sun the metal on the alien pair glittered as an ancient and primitive as the bronze statue of
the bull or the blades projecting from the homely brick wall. But the watching humans would have learned
long since not to be misled by appearances.

Tradition, and something like superstition among the religionless Aalaag, preserved the weapons and armor of
a time already more than fifty thousand Earth years lost and gone in their history, on whatever world had
given birth to these seven-foot conquerors of humanity. But their archaic dress and weaponry were only for
show.

The real power did not lie in their swords and power-lances; but in the little black-and-gold rods at their belts,
in the jewels of the rings on their massive forefingers, and in the tiny continually-moving orifice in the pommel
of each saddle, looking eternally and restlessly left and right among the crowd.