"John Norman - Gor 06 - Raiders of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

smiled. The Older Tarl, my former master-at-arms, had so spoken to me years
before in Ko-ro-ba, my city, the Towers of the Morning. I looked down at the
long, heavy, leather-wrapped bow of supple Ka-la-na wood in the bottom of the
rush craft.
I laughed.
It was true that the long bow is a weapon of peasants, who make and use
them, sometimes with great efficiency. That face, in inself, that the long is
a
peasant weapon, would make many Goreans, particularly those ont familiar with
the bow, look down upon it. Gorean warriors, generally drawn from the cities,
are warriors by blood, by caste; moreover, they are High Caste; the peasants,
isolate in their narrow fields and villages, are Low Caste; indeed, the
Peasant is
regarded, by those of the cities, as being little more than an ignoble brute,
ingnorant and superstitious, venal and vicious, a grubber in the dirt, a
plodding
animal, an ill-tempered beast, something at best cunning and treacherous; and
yet I knew that in each dirt-floored cone of straw that served as the dwelling
place of a peasant and his family, there was, by the fire hole, a Home Stone;
the
peasants themselves, though regarded as the lowest caste on all Gor by most
Goreans, call themselves proudly the ox on which the Home Stone rests, and I
think their saying is true.
Peasants, incidentally, are seldom, except in emergencies, utilized in the
armed forces of a city; this is a futher reason why their weapon, the long
bow, is
less known in the cities, and among warriors, than it deserves to be.
The Gorean, to my mind, is often, though not always, bound by historical
accidents and cultrual traditions, which are then often rationalized into a
semblance of plausibility. For example, I had even heard arguments ot the
effect
that pleasants used the long bow only because they lacked the manufacturing
capablity to produce crossbows, as though they could not have traded their
goods or sold animals ot obtain crossbows, if they wished. Further, the heavy,
bronze-headed spear and the short, double-edged steel sword are traditionally
regarded as the worthy, and prime, weapons of the Gorean fighting man, he at
least who is a true fighting man; and similarly traditionally, archers, who
slay
from a distance, not coming to grips with their enemy, with their almost
invisible,
swiftly moving shafts of wook, those mere splinters, are regarded as being
rather
contemptible, almost on the periphery of warriorhood; villains in Gorean
epics,
incidentally, when not of small and despised castes, are likely to be archers;
I
had heard warriors say that they would rather be poisoned by a woman than
slain by an arrow.
I myself, perhaps because I had been raised not on Gor, but on Earth, did
not, fortunately in my opinion, suffer from these inhibiting prepossessions; I