"Gordon R. Dickson - Dragon Knight 07 - The Dragon and the G" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

throw back.

This was another reason to keep their heads down, so that only spearpoints and steel helmets
should show above the stone. But the issue of a helmet and spear to the servants and tenants had
aroused a misplaced enthusiasm for a fight in many who had seldom been close to a battle.

"M'Lord?"

Jim stood up, backed from the battlements, and turned.

"Oh, it's you, John," he said, getting an unpleasant jolt at seeing the tall, stocky, middle-aged man
who was his Steward, the head of all his servants. John's duty was not on the battlements. It was
anywhere in the Castle, overseeing matters there. Alarm stirred. "Why are you here?"

"M'Lord!" said John, in a deep, portentous voice. "Boomps!"

"Oh, those!" said Jim. They had been having mysterious noises in the Castle starting about the
time the first of the peasants at the gate began to drift into this part of Somerset. He himself had
been the one to name the noise, vastly underestimating the superstition of those who worked for
him and regretting it later. The name came from an old Scottish prayer he had found while
writing a research paper for graduate school, hundreds of years in the future:

"From Ghoulits and Ghostits and lang-leggetty Betsties,

and Things that go boomp in the Night,

Good Lord deliver us!"

The word had fitted too exactly the sound of the noise, and the Castle's people had seized upon it
immediately. Naturally, a Lord and knight who was also a magickian would know the safe name
for such a thingтАФ"Naming calls," went the popular lore. The people were happy to have a name
to call the noises by that would not somehow conjure up the things causing them.

A faint paleness showed on John's large, clean-shaven face. As he saw it, he had come with
terrible news. News that deserved some alarm in the hearer.


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 Dickson, Gordon R. - Dragon Knight 07 - The Dragon and the Gnarly King (v1.0) (html)proofed

Unlike Jim and Angie (the Lady Angela), he and the other servants were terrified by the boomps
in the walls. The Castle people outdid each other in trying to imagine the horribleness of
whatever was causing the noise, and most were certain that something was coming to eat them
alive, one by one. Now John had come, bringing desperate news that, as he saw it, deserved a
reaction, even under siege conditions. But, it was plain that after Jim's response he felt both
helpless and hopeless.

тАФAnd Jim could not afford to have his chief servant losing all heart. The whole servant cadre
would see that he had, and disintegrate.