"Baker, Kage - The Queen in the Hill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

I was hard at work when our little boy was born. Lord Aegeus was with her.
It was the Lord Victor who came to me with the news. I was setting the framework of the arbor in place, down on my hands and knees packing in the earth with a maul, when I looked up and saw him there.
He was a cold-looking young man, Lord Victor, with his green eyes and his pointed red beard; so when I saw that coldness laid aside and real compassion in his eyes, I knew something terrible had happened. I scrambled to my feet.
He said, "Master Simeon, Maeve is delivered of a son." And I said, "Has she died?"
He shook his head. I said, "What is it, then?" and he cleared his throat before he answered me.
When he spoke it was with such delicacy, and such chill, and such anger I was almost more concerned for his discomfort than my own. He said: "I have been delegated to inform you that you have the Company's profound thanks for your contribution to their breeding program. A hybrid was successfully delivered this afternoon and, although he does not have the desired characteristics, his survival proves that the program still has a fifty-three point three chance of producing its objective. Do you know what that means, mortal man?"
I stammered, "No, my Lord."
He said it meant I was divorced now.
I dropped the maul where I stood and I don't think I said anything. He grimaced and closed his eyes before he went on to say: "The girl will be assigned to another mortal male. They'll try her again, to see what another genetic mix might produce. You're a clever fellow, you must have seen that the Company had plans for Maeve! And you will be rewarded for your efforts, at least: bigger and finer rooms for you, and your operating budget will be tripled."
I said, "May I see the boy?" and he said, simply, "You don't want to see the boy."
* * * *
It wasn't until years later that I knew what Lord Victor meant.
I found my boy by chance, in the warren of residential rooms attached to the Infirmary. It doesn't matter what I was doing there.
I looked in through a door and saw the youth who might have been dead Fallon, except that what clumps of hair he had were the color of mine. He had his mushroom-white hands pressed over his eyes and was rocking himself to and fro on his bed, thumping his big head against the wall. But all across that wall, and on the floor and even in corners of the ceiling, were scrawled mathematical formulae of such complexity I was dumfounded, though my grasp of engineering mathematics is better than most mortals'.
Do you know what it is to be cuckolded by a dead man, when he is no more than a film of ashes in his sunless grave? I know.
And it wasn't the first time I felt like a cuckold.
When Maeve had recovered sufficiently from the birth they gave her to a mortal I barely knew, who worked in their kitchens, and he got her with child but did not treat her well, so the immortals took her from him even sooner than they had taken her from me. The child was another boy.
She was passed then to the Lady Belisaria's mortal valet, and had another son; and then to the mortal who cleaned the pipes in the baths and reflecting pools, and produced yet another son. I lost track of her bridals after that.
Which is not to say I never saw her. I did glimpse her, now and again, wandering in the gardens to pick flowers or fruit. It was seldom, though, because she was seldom in any condition to walk far. And as the years went on Maeve's tiny perfect face became somehow a parody of itself, the features too sharp, the sweet mouth a little twisted.
But I finished her garden.
It far surpassed my topiary walk; the Lord and Ladies said so. How clever of me to make a moon-garden, all white and scented flowers and silvery herbage, best enjoyed under the stars! The scale was a little inconvenient for the immortals, as all the stone seats were set low and the stair risers too; but the neophyte classes, the children being transformed into immortals, found the place and made it their own. They played there in the long summer evenings and the dark trees echoed back their laughter. I had wanted children to laugh in that garden, but they were not my children.
Still, it was good that the place was used and loved. There was a moment, after I had planted the last narcissus bulb and opened the valve for the fountains, when I wanted to spray it all with Greek fire and destroy it in its completed perfection; but really that would have been a very stupid and ungrateful thing to do. If there is one thing the Lords and Ladies despise, it is wanton destruction, and surely I was better than the mortal men of the villages below us.
So I maintained it, and kept it beautiful. I was kneeling there one day when the Lord Victor came and sat on the steps beside me, watching a while. I was pruning the miniature roses. This must be done as carefully as paring a baby's fingernails, for they are not hardy bushes.
After a time he said, "How are you feeling these days, Master Simeon?"
I told him I was very well and thanked him for asking.
He was silent, staring at the little bushes. At last he said, "I'm leaving this mountain soon. I'm going off to do some field work at last."
I said, "Are you, my Lord?" and he made an affirmative sound. He stared out over the lawns, not seeming to see them. His hand went up to stroke his moustaches. He said, "It's a miserable posting, really. I'm being sent out to chase around after Totila. The Ostrogoth fellow, you know. He's all set to crush Rome again, and the Company needs someone on the spot to protect certain of its interests. I've been accessing data all week. Aegeus thinks I'm out of my mind."
I didn't know what to say so I just made sympathetic noises, and anyway I could tell that he was only speaking to me as a mortal man speaks to his dog. He went on: "He's right -- it's not a good way to begin a career. Not for someone with Executive training. I'll be wading into the mortal muck with the Preserver Class operatives! If Aegeus knew I'd requested it, he'd really be horrified.
"But I'm having a, what would you mortals call it? A crisis of faith, perhaps. Not a good thing, when one has a career to consider. I'd really rather not question my beliefs, but the longer I stay here in the midst of all this -- " he waved a hand at the pleasure gardens all around us -- "the harder it becomes. I think I need to go down into the mortal places and watch _real_ cruelty, real stupidity, real vanity. Perhaps then I can look at Aegeus with some sense of perspective. Perhaps then I'll learn to appreciate his point of view. Perhaps..."
His gaze drifted back to me. He sighed, supposing maybe that I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, "Do you know the myth of Jesus, Master Simeon?"
I told him of course I did. We are all taught about the dark superstitions that the mortals slave under, down there in their villages. Lord Victor said, "Do you suppose the Christ left Heaven for Earth to save mortal souls? Or is it possible he left because God's behavior disgusted him?"
I said it might be so.
He was silent a long time after that. At last he got to his feet, and his shadow fell across the work I was doing. He said, very quietly, "Master Simeon, I do beg your pardon." I squinted up at him where he loomed dark against the sun and I just nodded, for I couldn't think how to answer him. Then I looked down at my roses again and I saw his shadow move away from me.
I heard he went down into the mortal world not long after.
* * * *
Maeve was passed from mortal to mortal, and bore them all nothing but sons, which would have made her a very desirable wife indeed down in the mortal places where women were slaves, as I understood; but it did not seem to be what the immortals wanted from her. This even though some of the boys were quite presentable, kitten-faced children who could converse rationally and walk in the sunlight. Like their mother, they saw no particular virtue in courtesy or other social graces, and like her they were petted and spoiled by the Lords and Ladies who raised them. Most of them were little geniuses. They were not given eternal life, however.
And then, miraculously, Maeve bore a daughter to the mortal Wamba, who worked as a masseur in the Executive Gymnasium. What a celebration there was! Wamba was given new rooms and all the finery he could wear, and as a further favor he asked if he might divorce Maeve and marry one of the bath attendants, whom he had loved for some time. This was granted to him.
I don't know if Maeve cared. She basked for a while in the glory of having produced a daughter, and really a very pretty one; I saw the little girl when they were parading her around. She was not so pale as her mother, her skin was like rose petals and her hair like white gold; but she had the same great wide eyes and delicate face.
Yet Maeve, it seems, grew jealous of all the attention paid to her daughter. They caught her pinching the baby when she thought she was alone with it. The infant was taken away to be raised by Lady Maire and Maeve found herself in real disgrace for the first time in her life.
Lord Aegeus had no time for her, now. All his attentions were focused on little Amelie, the daughter. It was decided that Maeve had performed her duties admirably and would henceforth be allowed to rest. They allotted her a single room adjacent to the Infirmary. She would be given no new husbands, as her health had begun to suffer from constant breeding.
So I asked if I might have her back.
The Lords and Ladies bestowed her on me gladly enough, commending me for my sense of responsibility, but warned me that marital relations were best not resumed. They didn't need to tell me so much; Maeve had become a small wizened thing by this time, collapsed and sagging like an old woman, though she can't have been thirty yet. Her skin had begun to mar, also, with thick white blotches like scar tissue. The Lords and Ladies told me it was from too much exposure to sunlight.
But I couldn't leave her indoors by herself, so I swathed her in a hooded cloak and carried her about with me, and set her in the shade as I worked.
She talked constantly. Mostly it was bitter complaints about the way no-one ever brought her presents any more, and how unfair life was. Sometimes she would wander in her mind and hold long conversations with Fallon. I don't think she recognized me even when her mind was clear. I wasn't angry about this. There had been so many, after all, and I don't think time and memory were the same for her kind as they were for me. Whatever her kind might be.
I wondered if this was how the immortal ones regard my own race. Are we so brief and small and foolish in their eyes?
Anyway, she didn't last long.
I had taken the midday meal with her, spooned soup into her toothless mouth and napkined her little chin, nodding my agreement to the stream of complaints that never stopped, even while she was eating. Then I carried her to the shade of one of the vast trees I had had transplanted for her, for we were in her own garden that day. I set her down where she could see me and went to arrange the new bedding plants around the fountain.
I heard her talking to Fallon again, and was grateful, because it meant I wouldn't have to keep nodding to show I was paying attention. After a while I noticed she had grown silent and I turned. She looked as though she had gone to sleep.
I buried her in the narcissus bed, and then I went to tell Lord Aegeus. Perhaps I should have told him first, but she was already beginning to crumble in on herself; and I was afraid he might have some further use for her poor body.
* * * *