Richard Cowper - The Custodians
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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.
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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
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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
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分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：30 页
大小：73.82KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-11-23
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