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

was no moral from one end of this world to the other.
It would be possible to go on listing at great length the horrors and the
spectacles of the scenes laid out on the tile: the fields of dancing demons, the
fairy races, the succubi squatting on roofs, the holy fools draped in coats of
cow-dung, the satyrs, the spirits of graveside, roadside and hearth-side; the
weasel-kings and the bloated toads; and so on, and so on, behind every tree and on
every cloud, sliding down every waterfall and lingering beneath every rock: a world
haunted by the shapes of lust and animal lust and all that humanity called to its
bosom in the long nights of its despair.
Though Hollywoodуeven in its fledgling yearsуwas presenting itself to the
world as the very soul of the imagination, there was nothing going on before the
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Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
cameras there (nor would there be, ever) that could compete with what the master
tile-painters and their apprentices had created.
It was, as Sandru has said, the Devil's Country.
Zeffer went to Brascov to hire men, at prices five or six times what he
would have paid locally, because he wanted hands that could do the job with some
finesse, and minds that could count to a higher number than their fingers. He
devised the means by which the masterpiece could be removed himself. The tiles were
meticulously numbered on the reverse sides and a huge legend made of the room by
three cartographers he had also hired in the city, so that there would be a
meticulous record of the way the design had been laid out; and an obsessive
accounting of how the tiles were numbered, stacked and packed away; including a
detailed description of which tiles were cracked or damaged before they were packed,
which had been mislaid by the original tilers (there were a hundred and sixteen such
tiles; most turned ninety or a hundred and eighty degrees by an artisan too tired,
too bewildered or perhaps too drunk to realize his error); all so that when the
tiles were unpacked at the house in Coldheart Canyon there would be no difficulty
reordering them into the original design.
It was a long process; a total of eleven weeks were to pass before the
crated tiles were finally transported from the Fortress.
All the work had drawn much attention of course; from the brothers
themselves, who knew what was going on because Father Sandru had told them, and from
the villagers, who had only the vaguest of ideas of what all this was about. There
were rumors flying around that the removal was being undertaken because the tiles
had put the souls of the Fathers in spiritual jeopardy, but precise details of this
jeopardy changed from account to account.
The vast sum of money that was now in the possession of the Order did very
little to transform the lives of the priests, apart from inspiring some of the most
embittered exchanges in the history of the brotherhood. Several of the priests were
of the opinion that the tiles should not have been sold (not because of their merit,
but because it was not wise to loose such unholy images on the secular world). To
this, Father Sandruуwho was more often, and more publicly, drunk by the dayуoffered
only a sneering dismissal.
What does it matter?, he said to the complainers: they are only tiles, for
God's sake.
There were a good number of shaken heads by the way of response, and a very
eloquent riposte from one of the older Fathers, who said that God had put the tiles
into their protection, and it was cynical and careless of him to let them go. What