Naudsonce | Page 5

close look at their
weapons when they came in for their presents. Hunting arms. Most of
the spears have cross-guards, usually wooden, lashed on, to prevent a
wounded animal from running up the spear-shaft at the hunter. They
made boar-spears like that 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 does--"
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"--he nodded at the hundred-power screen--"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
rubble 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
travoises. 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 drag-marks
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 root-plants, and a lot of different legumes,
and things like tomatoes and pumpkins.
"Bet these people had a pretty good life, here--before 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 on whether we'll do these people
more harm than good."
Two more landing craft had come down from the Hubert Penrose; they
found Dave Questell superintending the unloading of more prefab-huts,
and two were already up that had been brought down with the first
landing.
A name for the planet had also arrived.
"Svantovit," Karl Dorver told him. "Principal god of the Baltic Slavs,
about three thousand years ago. Guy Vindinho dug it out of the
'Encyclopedia of Mythology.' Svantovit was represented as holding a
bow in one hand and a horn in the other."
"Well, that fits. What will we call the natives; Svantovitians, or
Svantovese?"
"Well, Paul wanted to call them Svantovese, but Luis persuaded him to
call them Svants. He said everybody'd call them that, anyhow, so we
might as well make it official from the start."

"We can call the language Svantovese," Lillian decided. "After dinner,
I am going to start playing back recordings and running off
audiovisuals. I