Cloud Howe. Lewis Grassic Gibbon
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Название: Cloud Howe

Автор: Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Зарубежная классика

Серия: Canongate Classics

isbn: 9781847678034

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ had found in the moors and the sun and the sea her surety unshaken, lost maybe herself, but she followed no cloud, be it named or unnamed.

      After Robert dies in the pulpit, with all the pages of his Bible soaked in the stream of blood from his lips, Chris speaks to the congregation in Christ’s words that come unbidden; ‘It is Finished!’ At that moment of tragedy she takes upon herself the priestly role reserved for men in her society. In the second last paragraph, as she leaves Segget for good, she once more mimes Robert, shaping her hands into the gesture with which he would bless the folk of Segget on Sabbath. The very last paragraph begins with an echo of her words in the kirk: ‘Then that had finished.’ She turns back to look at the hills, bare of clouds for once—the clouds of past doctrines and ideologies, ‘the pillars of mist that aye crowned their heights, all but a faint wisp vanishing south, and the bare, still rocks upturned to the sky.’

      Thomas Crawford

      NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

      MSS in the National Library of Scotland are quoted by kind permission of the NLS and of Gibbon’s daughter. Mrs Rhea Martin.

       Note on the Text

      The present text follows that of the first edition as scrupulously as possible, except in such matters of typographical styling as the use of roman, not italic, capitals for words emphasised in direct speech. Misprints that were not picked up in later editions have been corrected. We have gone back to the original paragraphs of 1933, and the map of Segget has been prepared from the one in the first edition.

       Map of Segget

alt

       PROEM

      THE BOROUGH of Segget stands under the Mounth, on the southern side, in the Mearns Howe, Fordoun lies near and Drumlithie nearer, you can see the Laurencekirk lights of a night glimmer and glow as the mists come down. If you climb the foothills to the ruined Kaimes, that was builded when Segget was no more than a place where the folk of old time had raised up a camp with earthen walls and with freestone dykes, and had died and had left their camp to wither under the spread of the grass and the whins—if you climbed up the Kaimes of a winter morn and looked to the east and you held your breath, you would maybe hear the sough of the sea, sighing and listening up through the dawn, or see a shower of sparks as a train came skirling through the woods from Stonehaven, stopping seldom enough at Segget, the drivers would clear their throats and would spit, and the guards would grin: as though ’twere a joke.

      But God alone knows what you’d want on the Kaimes, others had been there and had dug for treasure, nothing they’d found but some rusted swords, tint most like in the wars once waged in the days when the wife of the Sheriff of Mearns, Finella she was, laid trap for the King, King Kenneth the Third, as he came on a hunting jaunt through the land. For Kenneth had done her own son to death, and she swore that she’d even that score up yet; and he hunted slow through the forested Howe, it was winter, they tell, and in that far time the roads were winding puddles of glaur, the horses splashed to their long-tailed rumps. And the men of Finella heard of his coming, as that dreich clerk Wyntoun has told in his tale:

      As through the Mernys on a day

      The kyng was rydand hys hey way;

      Off hys awyne curt al suddanly

       Agayne hym ras a cumpany

      In to the towne of Fethyrkerne

      To fecht wyth hym thai ware sa yherne

      And he agayne thame faucht sa fast,

      Bot he thare slayne was at the last.

      So Kenneth was dead and there followed wars, Finella’s carles builded the Kaimes, a long line of battlements under the hills, midway a tower that was older still, a broch from the days of the Pictish men; there they lay and long months withstood the folk that came to avenge the death of Kenneth; and the darkness comes down on their waiting and fighting and all the ill things that they suffered and did.

      The Kaimes was left bare and with ruined walls, as Iohannes de Fordun tells in his time, a Fordoun childe him and had he had sense he’d have hidden the fact, not spread it abroad. Some kind of a cleric he was in those days, just after the Bruce drove out the English, maybe Fordoun then had less of a smell ere Iohannes tacked on the toun to his name. Well, the Kaimes lay there in Iohannes’ time, he tells that the Scots folk halted there going north one night to the battle of Bara; and one man with the Scots, a Lombard he was, looked out that morn as the army roused and the bugles blew out under the hills, and he saw the mists that went sailing by and below his feet the sun came quick down either slope of a brae to a place where a streamlet ran by a ruined camp. And it moved his heart, and he thought it an omen, in his own far land there were camps like that; and he swore that if he should survive the battle he’d come back to this place and claim grant of its land.

      Hew СКАЧАТЬ