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

long, beautiful decorated table had been set up in a clearing amongst the trees, and
at it sat a number of finely-bred dogs, while at their booted feet naked men fought
over scraps and bones. Closer examination showed the arrangement of figures to be
even more anarchic than it first appeared, for there were thirteen dogs at the
table, and in their center sat one dog with a halo perched between his pricked ears:
a canine Last Supper. An informed observer, knowing the traditional positions of the
Apostles, could have named them all. The writers of the Gospels were there in their
accustomed seats; John sitting closest to his master, Judas sitting at the perimeter
of the company, while Peter (a Saint Bernard) brooded at the other end, his furrowed
brow suggesting he already knew he would betray his master three times before the
long night was over.
Elsewhere in the landscape, the dogs were painted at far crueler work.
Tearing rabbits apart in one place, and ripping the flesh from a cornered stag in
another. In a third they were in a contest with a lion, and many had been
traumatically injured by the battle. Some crawled away from the place, trailing
their bowels; one had been thrown up into the trees, and its corpse hung there,
tongue lolling. Others lay sprawled in the grass in pools of blood. The hunters kept
their distance, no doubt waiting for the lion to become so weakened by blood-loss
that they could close in and claim the heroic moment for themselves.
But the most perverse of all the scenes were those in which erotic love and
hunting were conjoined.
There was, for instance, a place where the dogs had driven a number of naked
men and women up a gorge, where they had encountered a group of hunters armed with
spears and nets. The terrified couples clung to one another, but the netters and the
spearers knew their business. Men were separated from women and the men were run
through with spears, the women all bundled up in the nets, heaped on carts, and
carried away. The sexual servitude that awaited them was of a very particular kind.
Reading the walls from left to right the viewer's eye found that in an adjacent
valley the women were freed from the nets and strapped beneath the bodies of massive
centaurs, their legs stretched around the flanks of the animals. The women's
response to this terrible violation was something the artists had taken some trouble
to detail. One was screaming in agony, her head thrown back, as blood ran from the
place where she was being divided. Others appeared to be in ecstasy at this forced
marriage, pressing their faces joyously to the necks of their deflowerers.
But this part of the story did not finish there. If the 'reader', scanning
these walls, had continued his enquiry, he would have found that some of the men had
survived the massacre in the gorge, and returned, on a later sequence of tiles, to
hunt the creatures that had their wives in sexual thrall. These were some of the
most brilliantly painted sequences on the walls: the surviving lovers returning on
horseback, so as to match their speed to that of the centaurs. Lassoes circling in
the air over their heads, they closed on the centaurs, who were slowed down by the
very women they carried around to pleasure them. Several were brought down by ropes
around the neck, others were speared in the throat or flank. The women they carried
were not always lucky in these encounters. Though no doubt their rescuers intended
to free them, it was often the case that they perished beneath the weight of their
violators, as the dying centaurs rolled over, crushing them. Perhaps there was some
moral hereуsome lesson about the vulnerability of the innocent women when two tribes
of males were set against one another; but the artists seemed to take too much
grisly pleasure in their depictions for this to be the case. Rather, it appeared to
be done for the pleasure of the doing; of the imagining, and of the rendering. There