"Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 02 - Ancients of Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

fireflies which danced attendance above the heads of every man and woman. The thralls ate in
silence; only the chink and scrape of their knives underlay the high, clear voice of the praise-
sayer, who, at a lectern raised in one corner of the refectory, recited suras from the Puranas.
Alone amongst several hundred sullen servants, only Pandaras dared glance now and then at the
people on the platform.
Although the refectory was bleak, Yama found the formal style of the meals, a decad of
courses presented at intervals by liveried thralls, comfortingly familiar. It reminded him of
suppers at the long banqueting table in the Great Hall of the peel-house. He sprawled in a nest of
silk cushions (their delicate embroidery tattered, stained and musty) at a low square table he
shared with Syle, the secretary of the Department of Vaticination, and Syle's pregnant wife, Rega.
The rest of the domestic staff were grouped around other tables, and all were turned toward the
couches on which the two pythonesses reclined.
The Department of Vaticination was one of the oldest in the Palace of the Memory of the
People, and although it had fallen on hard times, it kept up its traditions. The food was poor,
mostly rice and glutinous vegetable sauces eaten with wedges of unleavened bread (the thralls
had it even worse, with only lentils and edible plastic), but it was served on fine, translucent
porcelain, and accompanied by thin, bitter wine in fragile cups of blown glass veined with gold
and silver.
Luria, the senior pythoness, overflowed her couch, looking, as Tamora liked to say, like a
grampus stranded on a mudbank. Crowned by a tower of red and gold fireflies, she ate with
surprising delicacy but ferocious appetite; usually, she had finished her portion and rung the bell
to signal that the dishes should be taken away before the others on the platform were halfway
done. Swags of flesh hung from her jowls and from her upper arms, and her eyes were half-
hidden by the puffy ramparts of her cheeks.
 They were large, her eyes, and a lustrous brown, with long, delicate lashes. Her black hair
was greased and tied in numerous plaits with colored silk ribbons, and she wore layers of colored
gauze that floated and stirred on the faintest breeze. Whenever she chose to walk, she had to be
supported by two thralls, but usually she was carried about on a chair.
She had been pythoness for more than a century. She was the imperturbable center of such
power that remained in the faded glory of the Department of Vaticination, like a bloated spider
brooding in a tattered web in a locked, airless room. Yama knew that she did not miss a single
nuance of the whispered conversations around her.
The junior pythoness, Daphoene, was Luria's starveling shadow. Only a single wan firefly
flickered above her flat, pale face, as if she were no better than the least of the kitchen thralls. She
wore a long white shift that, girdled with a belt of gold wires, covered her body from neck to
ankles. Her head was shaven, and lumpy scars wormed across her scalp. She was blind. Her eyes,
white as stones, were turned toward the ceiling while her fine-boned hands moved amongst the
bowls and cups on the tray a servant held before her, questing independently like small restless
animals. She never spoke, and did not appear to hear any of the conversations around her.
Yama suspected that Daphoene was inhabited by more than one person. Lately, he had
begun to sense that everyone had folded within themselves a small irreducible kernel of self, the
soul grown by the invisibly small machines which infected all of the changed bloodlines. But
Daphoene was a vessel for an uncountable number of kernels, a constant ferment of flickering
fragments.
The formal evening meals were a trial to Tamora, and she guyed her unease by playing up
the part of an uncouth cateran. That evening, after the argument in the Basilica, she had chosen to
sit alone at a table at the far end of the platform, and was more restless than ever. But the more
she played the barbarian, the more she endeared herself to Syle, who would incline his head
toward Yama and comment in an admiring, mock-scandalized whisper on the way Tamora tossed
and caught her knife over and over, or yawned widely, or noisily spat a bit of gristle onto the