"H. Beam Piper - Naudsonce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

on Terra a thousand years ago. Maybe they have to fight raiding parties from the hills once in a while, but
not often enough for them to develop special fighting weapons or techniques."

"Their village is fortified," Meillard mentioned.

"I question that," Gofredo differed. "There won't be more than a total of five hundred there; call that a
fighting strength of two hundred, to defend a twenty-five-hundred-meter perimeter, with woodchoppers'
axes and bows and spears. If you notice, there's no wall around the village itself. That palisade is just a
fence."

"Why would they mound the village up?" Questell, in the screen wondered. "You don't think the river gets
up that high, do you? Because if it doesтАФ"

Schallenmacher shook his head. "There just isn't enough watershed, and there's too much valley. I'll be
very much surprised if that stream, there"тАФhe nodded at the hundred-power screenтАФ"ever gets more
than six inches over the bank."

"I don't know what those houses are built of. This is all alluvial country; building stone would be almost
unobtainable. I don't see anything like a brick kiln. I don't see any evidence of irrigation, either, so there
must be plenty of rainfall. If they use adobe, or sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few
years, and they would be pulled down and the nibble shoved aside to make room for a new house. The
village has been rising on its own ruins, probably shifting back and forth from one end of that mound to
the other."

"If that's it, they've been there a long time," Karl Dorver said. "And how far have they advanced?"

"Early bronze; I'll bet they still use a lot of stone implements. Pre-dynastic Egypt, or very early
Tigris-Euphrates, in Terran terms. I can't see any evidence that they have the wheel. They have draft
animals; when we were coming down, I saw a few of them pulling pole travoisтАЩs. I'd say they've been
farming for a long time. They have quite a diversity of crops, and I suspect that they have some idea of
crop-rotation. I'm amazed at their musical instruments; they seem to have put more skill into making them
than anything else. I'm going to take a jeep, while they're all in the village, and have a look around the
fields, now."

Charley Loughran went along for specimens, and, for the ride, Lillian Ransby. Most of his guesses, he
found had been correct. He found a number of pole travoises, from which the animals had been
unhitched in the first panic when the landing craft had been coming down. Some of them had big baskets
permanently attached. There were dragmarks everywhere in the soft ground, but not a single wheel track.
He found one plow, cunningly put together with wooden pegs and rawhide lashings; the point was stone,
and it would only score a narrow groove, not a proper furrow. It was, however, fitted with a big bronze
ring to which a draft animal could be hitched. Most of the cultivation seemed to have been done with
spades and hoes. He found a couple of each, bronze, cast flat in an open-top mold. They hadn't learned
to make composite molds.

There was an even wider variety of crops than he had expected: two cereals, a number of different
rootplants, and a lot of different legumes, and things like tomatoes and pumpkins.

"Bet these people had a pretty good life, hereтАФbefore the Terrans came," Charley observed.

"Don't say that in front of Paul," Lillian warned. "He has enough to worry about now, without starting him