"George R. R. Martin - And Seven Times Never Kill Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

NeKrol was not fooled: he had seen other pyramids sliced to pieces by
the lasers of the Steel Angels and shattered by the flames of their blasters;
whatever powers the pyramids might have in Jaenshi myth, whatever
mysteries might lie behind their origin, it was not enough to stay the
swords of Bakkalon.
The glade around the pyramid-pool was alive with sunlight when
NeKrol entered, and the long grasses swayed in the light breeze, but most
of the waterfall folk were elsewhere. In the trees perhaps, climbing and
coupling and pulling down fruits, or ranging through the forests on their
hill. The trader found only a few small children riding on a bushog in the
clearing when he arrived. He sat down to wait, warm in the sunlight.
Soon the old talker appeared.
He sat down next to neKrol, a tiny shriveled Jaenshi with only a few
patches of dirty gray-white fur left to hide the wrinkles in his skin. He was
toothless, clawless, feeble; but his eyes, wide and golden and pupilless as
those of any Jaenshi, were still alert, alive. He was the talker of the
waterfall folk, the one in closest communion with the worship pyramid.
Every clan had a talker.
"I have something new to trade," neKrol said, in the soft slurred speech
of the Jaenshi. He had learned the tongue before coming here, back on
Avalon. Tomas Chung, the legendary Avalonian linguesp, had broken it
centuries before, when the Kleronomas Survey brushed by this world. No
other human had visited the Jaenshi since, but the maps of Kleronomas
and Chung's language-pattern analysis both remained alive in the
computers at the Avalon Institute for the Study of Non-Human
Intelligence.
"We have made you more statues, have fashioned new woods," the old
talker said. "What have you brought? Salt?"
NeKrol undid his knapsack, laid it out, and opened it. He took out one
of the bricks of salt he carried, and laid it before the old talker. "Salt," he
said. "And more." He laid the hunting rifle before the Jaenshi.
"What is this?" the old talker asked.
"Do you know of the Steel Angels?" neKrol asked.
The other nodded, a gesture neKrol had taught him. "The godless who
run from the dead valley speak of them. They are the ones who make the
gods grow silent, the pyramid breakers."
"This is a tool like the Steel Angels use to break your pyramids," neKrol
said. "I am offering it to you in trade."
The old talker sat very still. "But we do not wish to break pyramids," he
said.
"This tool can be used for other things," neKrol said. "In time, the Steel
Angels may come here, to break the pyramid of the waterfall folk. If by
then you have tools like this, you can stop them. The people of the pyramid
in the ring-of-stone tried to stop the Steel Angels with spears and knives,
and now they are scattered and wild and their children hang dead from
the walls of the City of the Steel Angels. Other clans of the Jaenshi were
unresisting, yet now they too are godless and landless. The time will come
when the waterfall folk will need this tool, old talker."
The Jaenshi elder lifted the laser and turned it curiously in his small
withered hands. "We must pray on this," he said. "Stay, Arik. Tonight we