"Hope Mirrlees - Lud in the Mist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mirrlees Hope)

ceiling, dead. And it was believed that echoes of the laughter with which Duke Aubrey greeted this
spectacle were, from time to time, still to be heard proceeding from that room.
But there had been pleasanter aspects to him. For one thing, he had been an exquisite poet, and such
of his songs as had come down were as fresh as flowers and as lonely as the cuckoo's cry. While in the
country stories were still told of his geniality and tenderness — how he would appear at a village wedding
with a cart-load of wine and cakes and fruit, or of how he would stand at the bedside of the dying, grave
and compassionate as a priest.
Nevertheless, the grim merchants, obsessed by a will to wealth, raised up the people against him. For
three days a bloody battle raged in the streets of Lud-in-the-Mist, in which fell all the nobles of Dorimare.
As for Duke Aubrey, he vanished — some said to Fairyland, where he was living to this day. During
those three days of bloodshed all the priests had vanished also. So Dorimare lost simultaneously its Duke
and its cult.
In the days of the Dukes, fairy things had been looked on with reverence, and the most solemn event of
the religious year had been the annual arrival from Fairyland of mysterious, hooded strangers with
milk-white mares, laden with offerings of fairy fruit for the Duke and the high-priest.
But after the revolution, when the merchants had seized all the legislative and administrative power, a
taboo was placed on all things fairy.
This was not to be wondered at. For one thing, the new rulers considered that the eating of fairy fruit
had been the chief cause of the degeneracy of the Dukes. It had, indeed, always been connected with
poetry and visions, which, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily
appear morbid to the sturdy common sense of a burgher-class in the making. There was certainly nothing
morbid about the men of the revolution, and under their regime what one can only call the tragic sense of
life vanished from poetry and art.
Besides, to the minds of the Dorimarites, fairy things had always spelled delusion. The songs and
legends described Fairyland as a country where the villages appeared to be made of gold and cinnamon
wood, and where priests, who lived on opobalsum and frankincense, hourly offered holocausts of
peacocks and golden bulls to the sun and the moon. But if an honest, clear-eyed mortal gazed on these
things long enough, the glittering castles would turn into old, gnarled trees, the lamps into glow-worms,
the precious stones into potsherds, and the magnificently-robed priests and their gorgeous sacrifices into
aged crones muttering over a fire of twigs.
The fairies themselves, tradition taught, were eternally jealous of the solid blessings of mortals, and,
clothed in invisibility, would crowd to weddings and wakes and fairs —wherever good victuals, in fact,
were to be found — and suck the juices from fruits and meats — in vain, for nothing could make them
substantial.
Nor was it only food that they stole. In out-of-the-way country places it was still believed that corpses
were but fairy cheats, made to resemble flesh and bone, but without any real substance — otherwise,
why should they turn so quickly to dust? But the real person, for which the corpse was but a flimsy
substitute, had been carried away by the Fairies, to tend their blue kine and reap their fields of
gillyflowers. The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the
dead. They called them both the "Silent People"; and the Milky Way they thought was the path along
which the dead were carried to Fairyland.
Another tradition said that their only means of communication was poetry and music; and in the country
poetry and music were still called "the language of the Silent People."
Naturally enough, men who were teaching the Dawl to run gold, who were digging canals and building
bridges, and seeing that the tradesmen gave good measure and used standard weights, and who liked
both virtues and commodities to be solid, had little patience for flimsy cheats. Nevertheless, the new
rulers were creating their own form of delusion, for it was they who founded in Dorimare the science of
jurisprudence, taking as their basis the primitive code used under the Dukes and adapting it to modern
conditions by the use of legal fictions.
Master Josiah Chanticleer (the father of Master Nathaniel), who had been a very ingenious and learned