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

will complain upon you for harboring a malignant, an enemy, a ruffian, fugitive, and recusant, a rapiner
and an otherwise offender against our Kings, their Crowns and Staves; and we will demand and, I do not
doubt, will obtain his return."
 Mallian bracked his tongue and again spraddled his legs.
Said one of the other guards, "Demand, then. It may be you will secure his return-- and with him, too,
the return of Bumberboom and all its Crew."
The Dwerfs made no reply to this but turned and proceeded to their ponies. One of them, however,
whirled around and flung out his hand and forefinger at Mal. "As for you, fellow!" he declared roundly,
"Were you at all instructed in any wise of medicine of history, you would understand-- you would
know-- that the bodily form of the Dwerfs is the original bodily form of all mankind. We have only pity
for you who descended out of those misshapen sufferers from the Great Gene Shift." He swung himself
about once more and neither of them spoke again. The two stout ponies went trot-a-trot down the road,
dust motes rising to dance in the sunbeams.
Mallian turned his head to see the stranger-men regarding him without expression. He thrust his hand
into his bosom and withdrew the letter of statements in its pouch. He handed it out... to the air, as it were,
for none reached to take it. After a moment and in some perplexity he asked, "Does none desire to
examine the well-phrased let-pass with which my natal territory-- or, to be more precise, its
governance-- has supplied me?"
With slight yawn one of them said, and he shook his head, "None of whom I know... Such ceremonies
are reserved for those arrived on official purposes, and not for mere proletaries or profugitives."
Stung by such belittling indifference, Mallian exclaimed to the effect that he was indeed on just such
purposes arrived. The strangers smiled at him a trifle scornfully. "These pretensions are at the moment
and under the circumstances amusing," they said, "but they will not do, barbado; a-no-no, they will not
do at all. Those arrived on official purposes unto this Land of Elver State, of which we of the corps of
guards are both the internal and the external defense, arrive with proper pomp. They, for one thing, are
dressed in garments of serrycloth, as indeed are we, ahem hum. For another, they ride upon
smooth-haired horses adorned with many trappings of broideries and burnishments, and so do all their
party-- which, by definition, is numerous. And for another and the last, though this by no means the least,
they come provided with a multitude of rich donatives of which distribution is made to the members of the
corps of guards."
Mallian cast down his eyes and gnawed upon his lips. "Nonetheless," he declared, "I have been issued
with this letter of statements directing all to let me pass, and the fact of your having made no gesture to
prevent my passage at all would not altogether seem to justify my failing to present it. And inasmuch as
you desire not to trouble to read it, it would be a pretty courtesy on my part to read it to you. I have
oftentimes been commended for my reading voice, and I doubt not but that you gallants of Elver Guards
will desire to do the same, and furthermore, the problem set down herein, which is the high purpose of
my journeyings, may so move you as to search among your minds to see if peradventure you know of a
medicine which may shed both light and hope thereon."
And he read them the let-pass, or letter of statements, as he had done to the pseudomorphs, and to
the People of the Moon.
"Ah, well," said one with a sniffle of his nose, "Interesting and absorbing as the beardy one's problem
is, and while I doubt not that the medicines of our Masters contains an answer to it-- it is no more than
the speck of a fly compared to the problem lying over the rise there. Anent which, let us move and
consider, for an action of some sort will assuredly be required of our hands."
They proceeded upward and then paused, considering, Mal with them. There had evidently been a
house of some sort there below, but it had been unstrategically situated in terms of the attempts of the
Crew of Bumberboom to pass with their weapon along the road above it. It had gone off the road, and
the marks of its going were eaten into the berm, and before it had either been brought to rest or come to
rest of its own accord, it had thoroughly crushed the house-- the fragments of which were being now
unskillfully transformed into cook-fires. The harnesses hung empty, the guideropes lay ignored upon the