"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

Sandru laughed. "Yes, women," he said, pointing towards a piece of the wall
some yards deeper into the chamber. "Go look," he said. "You'll find the whole thing
is filled with obscenities. The men who painted this place must have had some
strange dreams, let me tell you, if this is what they saw."
Zeffer pushed aside a small table, and then pressed himself between the wall
and a much larger piece of furniture, which looked like a wooden catafalque, too
large to move. Obliged to slide along the wall, his jacket did the job his
handkerchief had done moments before. Dust rose up in his face.
"Where now?" he asked the Father when he'd got to the other side of the
catafalque.
"A little further," Sandru replied, uncorking the brandy and shamelessly
taking a swig from the bottle.
"I need some more light back here," Zeffer said.
Reluctantly, Sandru went to pick up the lamp. It was hot now. He rummaged in
one of the nearby boxes to find something to protect his palm, found a length of
cloth and wrapped it around the base of the lamp. Then he tugged on the light-cord,
to give himself some more play, and made his way through the confusion of stuff in
the room, to where Zeffer was standing.
The closer Sandru came with the light the more Zeffer could make out of the
Page 12
Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
painting on the tiles. There was a vast panorama spread to left and right of him;
and up above his head; and down to the ground, spreading beneath his feet. Though
the walls were so filthy that in places the design was entirely obliterated, and in
other places there were large cracks in the tiles, the image had an extraordinary
reality all of its own.
"Closer," Zeffer said to Sandru, sacrificing the arm of his fur coat to
clean a great portion of tiled wall in front of him. Each tile was about six inches
square, perhaps a little smaller, and set close to one another with a minimum of
grouting, so as to preserve the continuity of the picture. Despite the sickly right
off the bulb, its luminescence still showed that the color of the image had not been
diminished by time. The beauty of the renderings was perfectly evident. There were a
dozen kinds of green in the trees, and more, sweeter hues in the growth between
them. Beneath the canopy there were burnt umbers and siennas and sepias in the
trunks and branches, skillfully highlighted to lend the impression that light was
falling through the foliage and catching the bark. Not all the tiles were rendered
with the same expertise, he saw.
Some of the tiles were the work of highly sophisticated artists; some the
work of journeyman; someуespecially those that were devoted to areas of pure
foliageуthe handiwork of apprentices, working on their craft by filling in areas
that their masters neither had the time nor perhaps the interest to address.
But none of this spoiled the power of the overall vision. In fact the
discontinuity of styles created a splendid energy in the piece. Portions of the
world were in focus, other parts were barely coherent; the abstract and the
representational sitting side by side on the wall, all part of one enormous story.
And what was that story? Plainly, given the kind of quarry Sandru had
listed, this was more than simply a hunt: it smacked of something far more
ambitious. But what? He peered at the tiles, his nose a few inches from the wall,
trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
"I looked at the whole room, before we put all the furniture in here,"