"Avram Davidson - Bumberboom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

Then, satisfied, he ordered the shot brought forward. Mog and his mates came up with the great round
stone, hoisted it... dropped it. The man responsible howled for his toes and then howled for his ribs as
Mog beat upon them. But it was done at last.
Next the fine powder was laid in a train along the groove to the touch-hole. "What next?" asked
Mallian. Pix looked into the book. "Next is fire," he said. "Captain Mog! A brand of fire!"
The Crewmen seemed unsure of how they should seem. What memories they might hold of actual
gunfire must be at many removes and quite dim, muted not by time alone but by the thick membranes of
their sluggish minds. They had been bred to the gun, lived by and for the gun, had nought but the great
gun at all. Yet they had never fired it, had forgotten how to make its fuel, forgotten perhaps all save some
dim glints of recollections of old mumblings and mutterings which served them for history. They were
excited. They were uneasy. Something new had come into their brute lives. One of them, who had
watched the loading, perhaps spoke for all. "Bumberboom... Bumberboom eat," he said.
Zembac Pix received the burning stick and said, before handling it to Mal, "Stand carefully as the
handbook directs, lest the cannon crush you by its-- " But Mallian, impatient, seized the fire and thrust it
at the train of powder. It hissed, vanished. Then, with a roar like thunder waging war on thunder, the
hideous muzzle-mouth spewed flame and smoke. The gun leaped as though wounded, fell back,
subsided. Darkness, thick darkness, evil stench surrounded them. Gradually, it cleared away. They
looked at each other. "...recoil," Zembac Pix finished his sentence.
The Crew rose slowly from the ground, idiot faces round with awe and terror and joy. The occasion
required words. They found them-- or, at least, it. "Bumberboom! Bumberboom! Bumberboom! Bum
berboom!" They leaped and lurched and shouted and roared.
"Bumberboom!
"Bumberboom!
"Bumberboom!"
Zembac Pix pointed far out into the Rift. "The shot seems to have scored a trench along that hillock.
Ha! Ahem hum-hum!"
"So I see... yes. Suppose that were a row of houses. Ha! Ha-ha!"
"Elver houses!"
"Bandy houses!"
"Ha ha!"
Something caught their eye. Something gleamed there in the trench now as clouds drifted away and the
sun came through-- a something which seemed to have slightly deflected the path of the stone shot. They
discussed what it might be, agreed that whatever it might be could well go on waiting. "Captain Mog!
On!"
"Forehead... harsh!"
It was a while later that they saw the Elvers descending by another road which allowed them to steer
far clear of the great gun and its Crew-- a line of Elver horsemen and behind each guard and riding on the
crupper, a man with a spade. "Curious," said Mal. "Very curious, Master-Lord," agreed Zembac Pix.
But by the time they themselves had gotten close enough to leave the toiling, chanting Crew and go and
see, the sight was more than merely curious.
"Observe, Mallian son Hazelip," said Naccanath, in an odd tone and a gesture. "See what sight the
monstrous voice of Bumberboom has uncovered."
It was a sight indeed. The hillock had been shoveled and the ground excavated a good way beneath
the surface of the general ground-level. There lay revealed the immense figure of an image with upraised
arm and with a crown or coronet upon its head from which radiated a series of great spikes at least twice
the length of a man. As far as they could see, it was clad in a flowing garment of some strange sort. It
was an unfamiliar shade of blue-green which was almost black.
"What is it?" asked Mallian, voice low with awe.
The Elvers shrugged. "Who can say... it seems to be hollow." Thus Naccanath. Durraneth had
something else to say.