Coldheart Canyon. Clive Barker

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      When he opened his eyes his gaze moved back and forth over the furniture and the boxes without lingering on anything in particular. The bare bulb was stark, of course, and its light far from flattering, but even taking that fact into account there was nothing in the room that caught Zeffer’s eye. There were some finely-wrought things, no question; but nothing extraordinary.

      And then, as he stood there, waiting for Sandru to return, his gaze moved beyond the objects that filled the chamber, and came to rest instead on the walls beyond.

      The chamber was not, he saw, made of bare stone. It was covered with tiles. In every sense, this was an understatement, for these were no ordinary tiles. Even by so ungenerous a light as the bare bulb threw upon them, and viewed by Zeffer’s weary eyes, it was clear they were of incredible sophistication and beauty.

      He didn’t wait for Father Sandru to return; rather, he began to push through the piles of furniture towards the designs that covered the walls. They covered the floor, too, he saw, and ceiling. In fact, the chamber was a single masterpiece of tile; every single inch of it decorated.

      In all his years of travelling and collecting he’d never seen anything quite like this. Careless of the dirt and dust laden webs which covered every surface, he pushed on through until he reached the nearest wall. It was filthy, of course, but he pulled a large silk handkerchief out of his pocket, and used it to scrub away some of the filth on the tiles. It had been plain even from a distance that the tiles were elaborately designed, but now, as he cleared a swathe across four or five, he realized that this was not an abstract pattern but a representation. There was part of a tree there, on one of the tiles, and on another, adjacent to it, a man on a white horse. The detail was astonishing. The horse was so finely painted, it looked about ready to prance off around the room.

      ‘It’s a hunt.’

      Sandru’s voice startled him; Willem jerked back from the wall, so suddenly that it was as though he’d had his face in a vacuum, and was pulling it free. He felt a drop of moisture plucked from the rim of his eye; saw it flying towards the cleaned tiles, defying gravity as it broke on the flank of the painted horse.

      It was a strange moment; an illusion surely. It took him a little time to shake off the oddness of it. When he looked round at Sandru, the man was slightly out of focus. He stared at the Father’s shape until his eyes corrected the problem. When they did he saw that Sandru had the brandy bottle back in his hand. Apparently its contents had been more potent than Zeffer had thought. The alcohol, along with the intensity of his stare, had left him feeling strangely dislocated; as though the world he’d been looking at – the painted man on his painted horse, riding past a painted tree – was more real than the old priest standing there in the doorway.

      ‘A hunt?’ he asked at last. ‘What kind of hunt?’

      ‘Oh, every kind,’ Sandru replied. ‘Pigs, dragons, women –’

      ‘Women?’

      Sandru laughed. ‘Yes, women,’ he said, pointing towards a piece of the wall some yards deeper into the chamber. ‘Go look,’ he said. ‘You’ll find the whole thing is filled with obscenities. The men who painted this place must have had some strange dreams, let me tell you, if this is what they saw.’

      Zeffer pushed aside a small table, and then pressed himself between the wall and a much larger piece of furniture, which looked like a wooden catafalque, too large to move. Obliged to slide along the wall, his jacket did the job his handkerchief had done moments before. Dust rose up in his face.

      ‘Where now?’ he asked the Father when he’d got to the other side of the catafalque.

      ‘A little further,’ Sandru replied, uncorking the brandy and shamelessly taking a swig from the bottle.

      ‘I need some more light back here,’ Zeffer said.

      Reluctantly, Sandru went to pick up the lamp. It was hot now. He rummaged in one of the nearby boxes to find something to protect his palm, found a length of cloth and wrapped it around the base of the lamp. Then he tugged on the light-cord, to give himself some more play, and made his way through the confusion of stuff in the room, to where Zeffer was standing.

      The closer Sandru came with the light the more Zeffer could make out of the painting on the tiles. There was a vast panorama spread to left and right of him; and up above his head; and down to the ground, spreading beneath his feet. Though the walls were so filthy that in places the design was entirely obliterated, and in other places there were large cracks in the tiles, the image had an extraordinary reality all of its own.

      ‘Closer,’ Zeffer said to Sandru, sacrificing the arm of his fur coat to clean a great portion of tiled wall in front of him. Each tile was about six inches square, perhaps a little smaller, and set close to one another with a minimum of grouting, so as to preserve the continuity of the picture. Despite the sickly light of the bulb, its luminescence still showed that the colour of the image had not been diminished by time. The beauty of the renderings was perfectly evident. There were a dozen kinds of green in the trees, and more, sweeter hues in the growth between them. Beneath the canopy there were burnt umbers and siennas and sepias in the trunks and branches, skilfully highlighted to lend the impression that light was falling through the foliage and catching the bark. Not all the tiles were rendered with the same expertise, he saw.

      Some of the tiles were the work of highly sophisticated artists; some the work of journeymen; some – especially those that were devoted to areas of pure foliage – the handiwork of apprentices, working on their craft by filling in areas that their masters neither had the time nor perhaps the interest to address.

      But none of this spoiled the power of the overall vision. In fact the discontinuity of styles created a splendid energy in the piece. Portions of the world were in focus, other parts were barely coherent; the abstract and the representational sitting side by side on the wall, all part of one enormous story.

      And what was that story? Plainly, given the kind of quarry Sandru had listed, this was more than simply a hunt: it smacked of something far more ambitious. But what? He peered at the tiles, his nose a few inches from the wall, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

      ‘I looked at the whole room, before we put all the furniture in here,’ Sandru said. ‘It’s a view, from the Fortress Tower.’

      ‘But not realistic?’

      ‘It depends what you mean by realistic,’ Sandru said. ‘If you look over the other side –’ he pointed across the room ‘– you can see the delta of the Danube.’ Zeffer could just make out the body of water, glittering in the gloom: and closer by a mass of swampy land, with dozens of inlets winding through it, on their way to the sea. ‘And there!’ Sandru went on, ‘to the left –’ again, Zeffer followed Sandru’s finger ‘– at the corner of the room, that rock –’

      ‘I see it.’

      The rock was tall, rising out of the ocean of trees like a tower, shrubs springing from its flank.

      ‘That’s called the May Rock,’ Sandru said. ‘The villagers dance there, on the first six nights of May. Couples would stay there overnight, and try to make children. It’s said the women always became pregnant if they stayed with their men on May Rock.’

      ‘So it exists? In the world, I mean. Out there.’

      ‘Yes, СКАЧАТЬ