《Coronach of the Bell》作者： - Christopher Stasheff 【EPUB】

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CORONACH OF THE BELL Christopher Stasheff THERE is a spruce a skeleton that stands above a forest in a mountain valley and from its tip a bell hangs highlone moaning in the wind. There is a pass into that valley but the sides are sharp and jagged-torn and twisted blackened granite. Onmeans death. Once a clan lived there when the spruce was quick with resin and fields of maize filled half the valley. There wpass between the mountains then for a granite bridge once joined them. But that bridge was hollow gutted out by adzpick honeycombed into a home for Manninglore. Manninglore bald and bearded hunchbacked stunted muscle-bound stooping from his years of toil. Manninglore born old. The wrinkles of birth never left his face hair never grew upon his scalp. quotChangelingquot the children called him. Hnot dare protest for his bandy legs could scarcely run and his bulging arms were much too slow for fighting. So of course his bald pate became the target for their mocking slaps-blows which as Manninglore learned quhe could but endure. The lesson of his childhood was patience the companion of his youth was solitude. So when he was old enough for numbering among the grown men of the clan and his beard already white bhe set the village at his back and climbed up to the granite bridge between the mountains. Behind a grove of trees he hhim out a cave hiding his door from village eyes. There in the leaf-broken sunlight of the cave mouth Manninglocross-legged and opened his soul to the totem of his clan the Wind. They grew old the men and women who had been young with Manninglore. Old and wrinkled stooped and gnthey