"Friesner, Esther M - ss - A Beltaine and Suspenders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

restful and just as fulfilling as jotting down dialect-and.spit-encrusted
ramblings. Telemachus was the only one to touch the painting itself, but as more
and more of the work came to light he graciously permitted Olivia and the
vicar--to have a hand in interpreting the inscriptions.

"It still reminds me of the Bayeux Tapestry," she remarked, looking up at the
section which was completely restored. It was an understandable association to
make. The figures of men, women, and angels were all done in the Norman style,
long-fingered hands cupped as if to catch the words scrolling from their mouths.
At their feet and over their heads were creatures divine and diabolical,
grotesques and fancies of the artist's mind, most of these scaled and crawling.

"It reminds me of an infestation of newts we once suffered through the vicarage,
before we got piped water," said Father Herrick. "Look, even the ones in the sky
are just so many salamanders with wings."

"Do you think --" Telemachus stammered, "-- do you think they might be dragons?"

The vicar sniffed. "Fairly pitiful dragons, if so. But quite in keeping with my
theory concerning Greater Ambrose. Look here, Miss Drummond--" he rose and
approached the mural, picking up a slender lathe with which to indicate those
points to which he referred. "Your Latin is almost as good as mine, and
Telemachus took a First in Classics at Oxford. We all came up with the same
translation, did we not?" He aimed the lathe at a banner of text running along
the lower edge of the painting.

"'Here Saint Augustine departs from Estadium, having converted many,'" Olivia
read once more. "That would be Staddle, I'd expect. 'Here Saint Augustine
returns to Estadium, to warn the people. Here Saint Augustine relates much of
how he came to Ambrosius Magnus, and of the evil rites, and of the lizards.'
Hmm. Augustine may have done a bang up job of converting the Angles, but this
just sounds like he was a failed Saint Patrick. Must've run into a plague of
reptiles -- one of my Wiltshire informants told me he remembered something like
that during spring thaw in the Jubilee year, although there were precious few
times that old geezer wasn't seeing snakes. When Augustine couldn't drive 'em
off, rather than admit it was due to some lacking of holy worth on his part and
queering the whole conversion assignment, he spread scurrilous stories about the
hamlet in question. Pretty good stories, if the folk here thought enough of 'era
to immortalize the incident on the church wall."

"But don't you see, Miss Drummond?" Father Herrick rapped his lathe so
vigorously against the wall that it snapped. Poor Telemachus yelped and scurried
down to check his precious painting for damage. "Saint Augustine did not
prevaricate! The connection is all here: the unnatural rites, the overwhelming
representation of a reptilian presence such as has been bag and baggage of all
self-respecting fertility cults since time began, the specific reference to
lizards. The linguistic clues could not be more blatant. And this mural is
documentary evidence that the arcane practices of Greater Ambrose Surlesard were
old even when Duke William the Bastard's reign over England was young! When we
speak of Saint Augustine's conversion of the Angles, we are speaking of the