Christopher Stasheff - Coronach of the Bell

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2024-11-24 0 0 40.57KB 5 页 5.9玖币

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CORONACH OF THE BELL

Christopher Stasheff

THERE is a spruce, a skeleton, that stands above a forest in a mountain valley, and from its tip, a bell hangs high and

lone, moaning in the wind.

There is a pass into that valley, but the sides are sharp and jagged-torn and twisted, blackened granite. One slip

means death.

Once a clan lived there, when the spruce was quick with resin and fields of maize filled half the valley. There was no

pass between the mountains then, for a granite bridge once joined them. But that bridge was hollow, gutted out by adze and

pick, honeycombed into a home for Manninglore.

Manninglore, bald and bearded, hunchbacked, stunted, muscle-bound, stooping from his years of toil.

Manninglore, born old.

The wrinkles of birth never left his face; hair never grew upon his scalp. "Changeling!" the children called him. He did

not dare protest, for his bandy legs could scarcely run and his bulging arms were much too slow for fighting.

So, of course, his bald pate became the target for their mocking slaps-blows which, as Manninglore learned quickly,

he could but endure. The lesson of his childhood was patience; the companion of his youth was solitude.

So, when he was old enough for numbering among the grown men of the clan, and his beard (already white) begun,

he set the village at his back and climbed up to the granite bridge between the mountains. Behind a grove of trees he hewed

him out a cave, hiding his door from village eyes. There, in the leaf-broken sunlight of the cave mouth, Manninglore sat

cross-legged and opened his soul to the totem of his clan, the Wind.

They grew old, the men and women who had been young with Manninglore. Old and wrinkled, stooped and gnarled,

they looked up to the mountainside with envy-envy, now, and longing; for those who rose before the dawn saw Manninglore

up high upon the granite bridge, leaning on his staff in sunlight, though the village of the clan still lay in shadow. His beard was

long, his shoulders stooped-but in all else, he had not changed.

"He is a sorcerer," said some. "He has dark knowledge."

"No," said most. "How could he age, who was ancient at his birth?"

Yet Manninglore had aged, though not in body. The whole of the bridge was hollow now, filled with crucibles and

books, with heaps of ore and precious earths. At the back, away from the valley, stood the bellows, anvil, and hearth of a

smithy. At the front, two windows, too small to be seen by the clan, looked out toward the village.

When Manninglore's generation were long in their graves, their children's children, old in their turn, looked to the

mountain with a curse, for Manninglore stood hale as ever, on the bridge of sunrise.

"Our grandfathers are dust," they muttered, "yet Manninglore lives."

"All that mountain is his home. We will die in huts of mud."

"What have we done with our lives?" they wondered. "We, and our grandfathers before us? Yet how much more has

Manninglore gleaned!"

"He has knowledge, dark knowledge to lengthen his life. But will he give of it?"

Then, in their envy and their shame, they would have gone to the mountain and put Manninglore to death, had they

dared- but the span of his powers was hidden, their limits unknown. So they kept to their village in fear and cursed the

mountain.

Then their anger fermented into bitterness and hatred. They cried to their totem for a sorcerer that they might safely

burn. Thus, from their guilt and self-pity, Demouach was born.

The clan gathered round the central fire, muttering, quiet in the night.

Then Demouach was hopping round the flame-pit, grinning and chirping-Demouach, the height of a knee, brittle

leather, hairless, with the form and the face of a man, but with parchment between his arms and sides and legs, and claws

where a man should have feet. Wordless, with only chirpings or wailings- Demouach, imbecile.

One long moment the clan crouched staring, silent. Then howling broke out, with drumming of feet and brands from

the fire whirling at the monster.

Demouach flew, screaming in terror and pain. Still coals struck him; the clan, gleeful, followed.

But they turned away, cursing in fear, when Demouach fell onto the mountainside.

Manninglore, bent over alembics and crucibles, heard the wail at his threshold, stumped bandy-legged to the

entryway, hauled back the door.

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