Richard Cowper - The Custodians

VIP免费

2024-11-23 1 0 73.82KB 30 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Cowper, Richard - The Custodians

The Custodians

by Richard Cowper

There has always been a strong sense of history present in science fiction, not only in the many parallel-

world stories but in the firm realization that the past shapes the future. A proper study of history should

extend in both directions in time. In this absorbing story Cowper takes us into the past, to an era when

we will be in the future. It is strong and deeply moving.

Although the monastery of Hautaire has dominated the Ix valley for more than twelve hundred years,

compared with the Jurassic limestone to which it clings, it might have been erected yesterday. Even the

megaliths which dot the surrounding hillside predate the abbey by several millennia. But if, geologically

speaking, Hautaire is still a newcomer, as a human monument it is already impressively ancient. For the

first two centuries following its foundation, it served the faithful as a pilgrims' sanctuary, then, less

happily, as a staging post for the Crusaders. By the thirteenth century, it had already known both fat

years and lean ones, and it was during one of the latter that, on a cool September afternoon in the year

1272, a grey-bearded, sunburnt man came striding up the white road which wound beside the brawling

Ix and hammered on the abbey doors with the butt of his staff.

There were rumors abroad that plague had broken out again in the southern ports, and the eye which

scrutinized the lone traveler through the grille was alert with apprehension. In response to a shouted

request the man snorted, flung off his cloak, discarded his tattered leather jerkin, and raised his bare

arms. Twisting his torso from side to side, he displayed his armpits. There followed a whispered

consultation within; then, with a rattle of chains and a protest of iron bolts, the oak wicket gate edged

inward grudgingly and the man stepped through.

The monk who had admitted him made haste to secure the door. "We hear there is plague abroad,

brother," he muttered by way of explanation.

The man shrugged on his jerkin, looping up the leather toggles with deft fingers. "The only plague in

these parts is ignorance," he observed sardonically.

"You have come far, brother?"

"Far enough," grunted the traveler.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Cowper,%20Richard%20-%20The%20Custodians%20(v1.0).htm (1 of 30)5-9-2007 13:24:16

Cowper, Richard - The Custodians

"From the south?"

The man slipped his arm through the strap of his satchel, eased it up onto his shoulder and then picked

up his staff. He watched as the heavy iron chain was hooked back on to its staple. "From the east," he

said.

The doorkeeper preceded his guest across the flagged courtyard and into a small room which was bare

except for a heavy wooden trestle table. Lying upon it was a huge, leather-bound registrum, a stone ink

pot and a quill pen. The monk frowned, licked his lips, picked up the quill and prodded it gingerly at the

ink.

The man smiled faintly. "By your leave, brother," he murmured, and, taking the dipped quill, he wrote in

rapid, flowing script: Meister Sternwärts—Seher—ex-Cathay.

The monk peered down at the ledger, his lips moving silently as he spelt his way laboriously through the

entry. By the time he was halfway through the second word, a dark flush had crept up his neck and

suffused his whole face. "Mea culpa, Magister," he muttered.

"So you've heard of Meister Sternwärts, have you, brother? And what have you heard, I wonder?"

In a rapid reflex action the simple monk sketched a flickering finger-cross in the air.

The man laughed. "Come, holy fool!" he cried, whacking the doorkeeper across the buttocks with his

stick. "Conduct me to Abbé Paulus, lest I conjure you into a salamander!"

* * *

In the seven hundred years which had passed since Meister Sternwärts strode up the long white road and

requested audience with the Abbé Paulus, the scene from the southern windows of the monastery had

changed surprisingly little. Over the seaward slopes of the distant hills, purple-ripe clouds were still

lowering their showers of rain like filmy nets, and high above the Ix valley the brown and white eagles

spiraled lazily upwards in an invisible funnel of warm air that had risen there like a fountain every sunny

day since the hills were first folded millions of years before. Even the road which Sternwärts had

trodden, though better surfaced, still followed much the same path, and if a few of the riverside fields

had expanded and swallowed up their immediate neighbors, the pattern of the stone walls was still

recognizably what it had been for centuries. Only the file of high-tension cable carriers striding

diagonally down across the valley on a stage of their march from the hydroelectric barrage in the high

mountains thirty miles to the north proclaimed that this was the twentieth century.

Gazing down the valley from the library window of Hautaire, Spindrift saw the tiny distant figure

trudging up the long slope, saw the sunlight glittering from blond hair as though from a fleck of gold

dust, and found himself recalling the teams of men with their white helmets and their clattering machine

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Cowper,%20Richard%20-%20The%20Custodians%20(v1.0).htm (2 of 30)5-9-2007 13:24:16

Cowper, Richard - The Custodians

who had come to erect those giant pylons. He remembered how the brothers had discussed the brash

invasion of their privacy and had all agreed that things would never be the same again. Yet the fact

remained that within a few short months they had grown accustomed to the novelty, and now Spindrift

was no longer sure that he could remember exactly what the valley had looked like before the coming of

the pylons. Which was odd, he reflected, because he recalled very clearly the first time he had set eyes

upon Hautaire, and there had certainly been no pylons then.

May, 1923, it had been. He had bicycled up from the coast with his scanty possessions stuffed into a pair

of basketwork panniers slung from his carrier. For the previous six months he had been gathering scraps

of material for a projected doctoral thesis on the life and works of the shadowy "Meister Sternwärts" and

had written to the abbot of Hautaire on the remote off-chance that some record of a possible visit by the

Meister might still survive in the monastery archives. He explained that he had some reason to believe

that Sternwärts might have visited Hautaire but that his evidence for this was, admittedly, of the

slenderest kind, being based as it was on a single cryptic reference in a letter dated 1274, sent by the

Meister to a friend in Basel.

Spindrift's enquiry had eventually been answered by a certain Fr. Roderigo, who explained that, since he

was custodian of the monastery library, the Abbé Ferrand had accordingly passed M. Spindrift's letter on

to him. He was, he continued, profoundly intrigued by M. Spindrift's enquiry, because in all the years he

had been in charge of the abbey library, no one had ever expressed the remotest interest in Meister

Sternwärts; in fact, to the best of his knowledge, he, Fr. Roderigo, and the Abbé Ferrand were the only

two men now alive who knew that the Meister had spent his last years as an honored guest of the

thirteenth-century abbey and had, in all probability, worked in that very library in which his letter was

now being written. He concluded with the warm assurance that any such information concerning the

Meister as he himself had acquired over the years was at M. Spindrift's disposal.

Spindrift had hardly been able to believe his good fortune. Only the most fantastic chance had led to his

turning up that letter in Basel in the first place—the lone survivor of a correspondence which had ended

in the incinerators of the Inquisition. Now there seemed to be a real chance that the slender corpus of the

Meister's surviving works might be expanded beyond the gnomic apothegms of the Illuminatum! He had

written back by return of post suggesting diffidently that he might perhaps be permitted to visit the

monastery in person and give himself the inestimable pleasure of conversing with Fr. Roderigo. An

invitation had come winging back, urging him to spend as long as he wished as a lay guest of the order.

If, in those far-off days, you had asked Marcus Spindrift what he believed in, the one concept he would

certainly never have offered you would have been predestination. He had survived the war to emerge as

a junior lieutenant in the Supply Corps and, on demobilization, had lost no time in returning to his first

love, medieval philosophy. The mindless carnage which he had witnessed from the sidelines had done

much to reinforce his interest in the works of the early Christian mystics, with particular reference to the

bans hommes of the Albigensian heresy. His stumbling across an ancient handwritten transcript of

Sternwärt's Illuminatum in the shell-shattered ruins of a presbytery in Armentières in April, 1918, had,

for Spindrift, all the impact of a genuine spiritual revelation. Some tantalizing quality in the Meister's

thought had called out to him across the gulf of the centuries, and there and then he had determined that

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Cowper,%20Richard%20-%20The%20Custodians%20(v1.0).htm (3 of 30)5-9-2007 13:24:16

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Richard Cowper - The Custodians.pdf

共30页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Richard Cowper - The Custodians

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: