"R. A. MacAvoy - The Book of Kells" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

The Smasher didn't answer.




Chapter One
Bound to Render the King of Laighin Horses and Drinking Horns to Caiseal Gold and riches brought
across the Sea Are what is due from the Leinstermen.
The Leinstermen are comrades to Munster Against the Foreigners in any battle. Should the Gaill
come to them truly The King of Caiseal must repulse them.

Leabher n-gCeart, The Book of Rights

Perhaps the sound of the Uillean pipes was knocking plaster from the ceiling, or perhaps John
Thornburn had neglected his household duties, for the ramps of sunlight braced against the floor were
sparkling with white motes. Each oblong of light was broken by the shadow of window mintons, like a
Cartesian grid, and each contained a single floating shadow-circle, thrown by the tatted pulls on the
window blinds.
John let his gaze slide abstractedly from his work to the sun splashes and then back again. Circles on
a grid. How appropriate. All over his house. He flattened the huge, blue-checked tracing tissue over the
heavy paper and crayon rubbing below it and lifted limp flaxen hair out of his eye. His free hand (free
except for the pencil between thumb and index finger) groped around blindly, seeking his blue fisherman's
cap, which he usually used to keep his hair off his face. Not finding that, it crawled to the head of the
drafting table and snatched up a paperclip. This he thrust into his forelock, bobby-pin style.
John Thornburn had a rather vague face and eyes of two different colors, which he had inherited from
his grandfather. Grandpa had been a large, crusty old man who had prided himself on being one of the
last of the purebred Micmac Indians in Newfoundland. On Cape Breton there were plenty of these, but
in Newfoundland they were getting scarce. Grandpa even claimed that an ancestor of his had been a
Beothuck taken in a raid, though as far as anyone knew there had been no Beothucks left by smallpox
and English bullets even as long ago as two hundred years. (Because he was Grandfather, he had gotten
away with it, despite the telltale blue eye.) John was immensely proud of his status as a Newfoundland
Jack-a-tar, or half-breed, though he had noth ing of his grandfather in him except the eyes. (Unless he
could count his inability to grow a noticeable beard.) He stood five feet five and a half inches tall.
He had come to Ireland because Derval O'Keane asked him to, and because the Book of Kells was
here. He worshiped that scripture in a way that had nothing much to do with its religious content. It
grieved him that after coming so far, he was only permitted to see a single page at a time, and that
through glass.
 Circles on a gridтАФspirals, really. Winding and unwinding to wind again. John overlay the nubbly soft
suggestions of form with spirals exact and mathematical. He knew he had exactly one thousand spirals to
copy, for he had counted them. The tissue crackled beneath his hand.
This was a high day for John: a day of fulfillment. The cross whose bog-brown fragments he had
traced was in a peculiar sense his cross, for it had lain in the basement of the Museum at Trinity College,
untouched, for five years. No one before him had cared to trace its designs, perhaps because the subject
matter of its central panel was not considered fit for display. But for the influence of Dr. Derval O'Keane,
John would not have been given his chance.
Not that this work would make any professional or financial difference for John. No school or
museum was waiting eagerly to see how the rubbing turned out; no one had suggested paying John
Thornburn for the work. Nor had he academic credentials to advance, not even the bachelor's degree he
had pursued for three dazed years in New York. He hadn't even an opinion on the provenance or
meaning of the stone he had traced. He merely liked the looks of it.