The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
Again the laughter as he prodded his chest.
“People like me,” he said.
Abdullah’s work would be to photograph the opening of the jars, at each stage, then any contents, page by page. Facsimilies would be made from the photographs.
“These facsimilies would be for sale?”
“Not officially of course”—he smiled—“but all things are negotiable, yes?”
Abdullah was here, but the news is not good. He has been unable to obtain copies yet, not just for me but for others, as he must not be caught compromising his position at the museum. He has photographed several manuscripts so far.
It is a mixed bag, apparently, and includes two pieces by Plato, a play by Platus called Servius Pompus, and twenty pages of a manuscript by Julius Caesar, entitled His Secret Dialogues with the Priests of Gaul on the Nature of their Magic and Rituals.
The final piece of parchment contains an even more exquisite original hand: that (it is believed) of Homer himself. It is a fragment of his Iliad, and consists of half of the Death of Hector, all the Funeral of Patroclus, and a third or so of the Funeral Games. It is a manifestly ancient hand, and the Egyptians are quite convinced that it is the writings of Homer, adding weight to the argument that Homer was one man, and not a collective of writers.
All of this would be enough to excite me beyond tolerance, but Abdullah, aware of the nature of my search, has now told me something that holds me breathless in anticipation: that the Iliad fragment contains reference to a “blood thorn. ”
That is the facsimile I want. I have told him that no matter what else he obtains, he must get that fragment of unknown Homer. My enthusiasm has no doubt put up the price of those lines of verse, but I am sure I am being skillfully teased into such a state by Abdullah. He could probably produce the goods now, but is jigging the price up with his procrastination, pretending he is being watched too closely. I can play the game too, and have let him see me packing my suitcase, and looking anxiously at my diary.
I am back at the cottage in Scarfell, the place of my birth. I have come here because I feel I have been summoned home. I have been at Cambridge for most of the summer, but the voice of something dark, something omnipresent, has called me here . . . home to the cottage, to the wild valley, to the tree.
I have translated much that Abdullah was able to sell me. And indeed, the documents make fascinating reading.
The “new” play by Titus Maccius Plautus (200 b.c.) is hilarious. Servius Pompus is completely typical, dealing with a common legionary in Fabius’ army who is convinced he is of noble birth, and treats his comrades like dirt. His ultimate discovery that he is slave-born earns him a permanent position: on a cart, collecting the dung left behind by Hannibal’s elephants.
The fragment of Caesar is most atypical however and very strange, detailing as it does the legendary and magic matter of the Celtic inhabitants of Europe, and there is a fascinating revelation concerning the coded language that existed within the arrangement of the stones on the landscape.
All that is for another paper. For the moment, it is the Homeric verse that excites me, for in this fragment of the epic cycle of the Greeks on the shores of Asia Minor there is a reference to the resurrection that confirms me in two beliefs: that there has been a deliberate effort to obliterate this knowledge from the world, and that someone—or some thing—is guiding my search to build again that knowledge from the clues I am gradually discovering.
The autumn day is dark as I write this, with huge columns of thunderous cloud drifting over Scarfell from the west. I am working by lamplight. I am chilled to the bone. The great rugged face of the fell surrounds me, and the solitary thorn— black against the darkness—seems to lean towards me through the small leaded windows that show its sinister form. That tree has known eternity. I sense now that it has seen me learn of Achilles, and his unsure use of the ancient magic.
Here then is my crude translation of the passage of the Iliad that is relevant. It is from the “Funeral of Patroclus,” Achilles’ great friend. While Achilles sulked in his tent, during the siege of Troy, Patroclus donned the man’s armour and fought in his place, only to be killed by the Trojan hero Hector. After Patroclus’s body had been burned on the funeral pyre . . .
Here, the fragment returns to the story content as we know it: the funeral games for Patroclus and the final reckoning between Achilles and the Trojan champion, Hector. My translation leaves a great deal to be desired. The metre of Homer’s verse in the original seems very crude, not at all as we have become used to it, and perhaps later generations than Homer have “cleaned up” the old man’s act, as it were. But there is power in the words, and an odd obsession with “earth.” When Homer wrote them, I am sure he was powered by the magic of Zeus, a magic that Achilles had attempted to invoke.
Poor Achilles. I believe I understand his error. The whole ritual of the burial, of course, was intended to bring Patroclus back to life!
His mistake was in following the normal Mycenaean custom of burning the body of his friend upon the pyre. Patroclus never rose again. He couldn’t. It is apparent to me that Zeus tried to warn him not to follow custom, not to place the body of his friend upon the burning faggots, because several lines previously (as the body of Patroclus was laid upon the pyre), Homer had written: