"Katherine Kurtz - Camber 3 - Camber the Heretic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kurtz Katherine)

spacious altar and retable of rose-marble. The statue of the chapel's patron
saint loomed larger than life, carved in a pale grey stone which gleamed almost
silver in the light of a thick candle at its feet, arms upstretched to support a
jewelled replica of Gwynedd's crown of intertwined crosses and leaves. The pale
tones contrasted subtly with the delicate rose of the altar itself, and paler pink
marble veined in smoky grey faced the walls of the sanctuary and formed the
altar rail, the color heightened by the glow of the red-shielded Presence Lamp
which burned at the right of the altar. The Monstrance on the altar below the
Rood Cross glowed like a ruddy sun in the wash of rose light.
Camber let out a low sigh as he and Joram came up to the gates of the altar
rail, doggedly fixing his attention on the Monstrance and its sacred Host as he
sank to his knees and signed himself with an automatic gesture.
Keeping his mind to his customary set of prayers before the Sacred
Presence, he closed his eyes and shut out the sight of the statue, willed a little
of the serenity he derived therefrom to flow into his son, kneeling at his left
elbow.
But when the prayers were finished, he had no choice but to open his eyes
and look up at the figure which the world now knew as Saint Camber. His
annoyance at the idealization they had made of him was overshadowed, as it
had been before, by the enormity of the lie he had been living.
What colossal conceit to have allowed it to continue! True, he had not yet
been struck down by lightning or otherwise shown the measure of Heaven's
wrath; but he could not, in conscience, believe that there would not be a price
to pay for what he had done.
His intentions, of course, had always been as pure as he could conceive. So
far, though the fight was far from ever, he and his children had managed fairly
well to keep alive the ideals they had hoped to preserve from the beginning, by
placing Cinhil on the throne of Gwynedd.
There had been setbacks, to be sure, not the least of which had been
Alister's untimely death in battle with Ariella. And the human lords who had
flocked to Court in the wake of Cinhil's restoration had gained far more
influence than Camber and his kin had hoped they would.
But to balance that was the closeness of Cinhil and Camber, which had
endured for nearly fifteen years now, though of course Cinhil did not know that
it was Camber and not Alister with whom he had dealt so intimately and on so
regular a basis for the past twelve. That, alone, had been worth the price
Camber had had to pay, if all the factors be totaled.
That price, of course, was another story altogether. Though the world had
accepted him as Alister Cullen, Bishop of Grecotha and Chancellor of Gwynedd,
Camber knew that this part of his life was a sham. True, he had legitimated his
raising to the episcopate, by being properly ordained a priest before allowing
the late Archbishop Anscom to consecrate him bishop. And he had never
offended the letter of canon lawтАФthough he had bent it тАФand the spirit of that
law had doubtless been broken times too numerous to count.
What distressed him most, on those rare occasions when he permitted
himself to think about it, was that he had been forced to stand by and witness
the travesty of his own canonization, powerless to object any more strongly
than he had, lest he lose all for which he and his had fought.
And what of those who believed in Saint Camber? In some ways, that
bothered Camber even more than the obvious accounting he would have to