"Walter M. Miller - The Lost Masters - Volume 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Walter M)

though the jolt caused a minor collapse a few feet away. The pilgrimтАЩs marks, though blurred by his
handling of the stone, were still dear enough to be copied. Brother Francis carefully redrew them on
another rock, using a charred stick as a stylus. When Prior Cheroki made his Sabbath tour of the
hermitages, perhaps the priest would be able to say whether the marks had meaning, either as charm or
curse. To fear the pagan cabals was forbidden, but the novice was curious at least to learn what sign
would be overhanging his sleeping pit, in view of the weight of the masonry on which the sign was written.
His labors continued through the heat of the afternoon. A corner of his mind kept reminding him of
the holeтАУthe interesting, and yet fearsome, little holeтАУand the way the rattle of gravel had caused faint
echoes from somewhere below ground. He knew that the ruins all about him here were very old. He
knew also, from tradition that the ruins had been gradually eroded into these anomalous heaps of stone
by generations of monks and occasional strangers, men seeking a load of stone or looking for the bits of
rusty steel which could be found by shattering the larger sections of columns and slabs to extract the
ancient strips of that metal, mysteriously planted in the rocks by men of an age almost forgotten to the
world. This human erosion had all but obliterated the resemblance to buildings, which tradition ascribed
to the ruins in an earlier period, although the abbeyтАЩs present master-builder still took pride in his ability
to sense and to point out the vestige of a floor plan here and there. And there was still metal to be found,
if anyone cared to break enough rock to find it.
The abbey itself had been built of these stones. That several centuries of stonemasons might have
left anything of interest still to be discovered in the ruins, Francis regarded as improbable fancy. And yet,
he had never heard anyone mention buildings with basements or underground rooms. The master-builder,
he recalled at last, had been quite specific in saying that the buildings at this site had had aspects of hasty
construction, lacked deep foundations, and had rested for the most part on flat surface slabs.
With his shelter approaching completion, Brother Francis ventured back to the hole and stood
looking down at it; he was unable to put off the desert-dwellerтАЩs conviction that wherever a place exists
to hide from the sun, something is already hiding in it. Even if the hole was now uninhabited, something
would certainly slither into it before tomorrowтАЩs dawn. On the other hand, if something already lived in
the hole, Francis thought it safer to make its acquaintance by day than by night. There seemed to be no
tracks in the vicinity except his own, the pilgrimтАЩs, and the tracks of the wolves.
Making a quick decision, he began clearing rubble and sand away from the hole. After half an hour
of this, the hole was no larger, but his conviction that it opened into a subterranean pit had become a
certainty. Two small boulders, half buried, and adjoining the opening, were obviously jammed together
by the force of too much mass crowding the mouth of a shaft; they seemed caught in a bottleneck.
When he pried one stone toward the right, its neighbor rolled left, until no further motion was
possible. The reverse effect occurred when he pried in the opposing direction, but he continued to jostle
at the rock-jam.
His lever spontaneously leaped from his grasp, delivered a glancing blow to the side of his head,
and disappeared in a sudden cave-in. The sharp blow sent him reeling. A flying stone from the rockslide
struck him in the back and he fell gasping, uncertain whether or not he was falling into the pit until the
instant his belly hit solid ground and he hugged it. The roar of the rockfall was deafening but brief.
Blinded by dust, Francis lay gasping for breath and wondering whether he dared to move, so sharp
was the pain in his back, Having recovered a little breath, he managed to get one hand inside his habit
and groped for the place between his shoulders where a few crushed bones might be. The place felt
rough, and it stung. His fingers came away damp and red. He moved, but groaned and lay quietly again.
There was a soft beating of wings. Brother Francis glanced up in time to see the buzzard preparing
to alight on a rubble heap a few yards away. The bird took wing again at once, but Francis imagined that
it had eyed him with a sort of motherly concern in the manner of a worried hen. He rolled over quickly. A
whole black heavenly host of them had gathered, and they circled at a curiously low altitude. Just
skimming the mounds. They soared higher when he moved. Suddenly ignoring the possibility of chipped
vertebrae or a crushed rib, the novice climbed shakily to his feet. Disappointed, the black sky-horde
rode back to altitude on their invisible elevators of hot air, then disbanded and dispersed toward their