The Arrows of Hercules

Начало книги

It was spring. A blustering boreal wind whistled clown from the flanks of the snow-crested Apennines, making the umbrella pines nod and the slender cypresses sway. It roared across the dark green Campanian plain, drying the brown mud of the fields around the villages and ruffling the sky-blue puddles left by the recent rain.

The wind rushed on over the Phlegraean Fields, a weird, legend-haunted region of sharp-ridged volcanic craters, of hot springs and sulfur-breathing lakes, of mysterious caverns which, men said, led to the underworld. It stirred the dense, dark thickets of ilex that crowded round the base of the citadel of Cumae. It flapped the woolens of those who clustered about the door to the Sibyl's chambers, on the seaward side of the Kill. It billowed the Campanian magnate's scarlet cloak, the Roman knight's chalk-whitened toga, the white cloaks of the bourgeois, and the brown cloaks of the soldiers and workers. It fluttered the threadbare shirts of the shivering slaves. It stirred the Tyrrhenian Sea at the foot of the hill until the water sparkled in the reborn sun like the swords of a distant battle. Overhead, the leaden pall of the last ten-day rolled away to southward, leaving a deep bright sky streaked with snowy plumes of cirrus.

Читать дальше →