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

sprouted legs covered with golden scales, came through the trees in solemn shoals,
spitting fire. The trees ahead of them were aflame; burning birds rose up from the
canopy.
In the swamp, a small town stood on long limbs, its presence appearing to
mark the position of some place that had existed there once but had been taken by
time, or a prophecy of some settlement to come. The artists had taken liberties with
the rendering, foreshortening the scene so that the occupants of the city were
almost as big as their houses, and could be plainly seen. There were excesses here,
too; perversities just as profound as anything the Wild Wood was hosting. Through
one of the windows a man could be seen spread-eagled on a table, around which sat a
number of guests, all watching a large worm enter him anally and then erupt from his
open mouth. Another was the scene of a strange summoning, in which a host of black
birds with human heads rose up from the ground, circling a girl-child who was either
their invoker or their victim. In a third house a woman was squatting and shedding
menstrual blood through a hole in the floor. Several men, smaller than the woman
above by half, were swimming in the water below and undergoing some calamitous
transformation, presumably brought on by the menses. Their heads had flowered into
dark, monstrous shapes; demonic tails had sprouted from their backsides.
As Father Sandru had warned (or was it boasted?) to Zeffer, there was no
part of the landscape depicted there on the walls that was not haunted by some
bizarre sight or other. Even the clouds (innocent enough, surely) shat rains of fire
in one place, and evacuated skulls in another. Demons cavorted unchallenged over the
open sky, like dancers possessed by some celestial music, while stars fell between
them; others rose over the horizon, leering like emaciated fools. And in that same
sky, as though to suggest that this was a world of perpetual twilight, teetering
always on the edge of darkness and extinction, was a sun that was three-quarters
eclipsed by an exquisitely rendered moon, the latter painted so cunningly it seemed
to have real mass, real roundness, as it slid over the face of the day-star.
In one place there was painted a line of crowned figuresуthe kings and
queens of Romania, back to ancient timesуpainted marching into the ground. The noble
line rotted as it proceeded into the earth, carrion birds alighting on the
descending lineage, plucking out regal eyes and law-giving tongues. In another place
a circle of witches rose in a spiral from a spot marked by standing-stones; their
innocent victims, babies whose fat had been used to make the flying ointment in
which they had slathered themselves, lay scattered between the stones like neglected
dolls.
And all through this world of monstrous hurts and occasional miracles, the
Hunt.
Many of the scenes were simply documents of the vigorous beauty of the
chase; they looked as though they could have been painted from life. There was a
pack of dogs, white and black and pie-bald (one bitch charmingly attending to her
suckling pups); some being muzzled by peasants, others straining on their leashes as
they were led away to join the great assembly of hunters. Elsewhere, the dogs could
be seen accompanying the hunters. Where the Duke had chosen to kneel and pray, a
white dog knelt beside him, his noble head bowed by the weight of shared devotion.
In another, the dogs were splashing in a river, attempting to catch the huge salmon
outlined in the stylized blue waters. And in a third place, for no apparent reason
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Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
but the playfulness of the artists, the role of dogs and men had been reversed. A