"The Collapsium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

forgetting their names. He had been at court for almost three decades, so there
really wasn't much excuse. The third woman, Tusite something, was one of Tamra's
personal friends, and consequently treated him with chilly regard. Are you back,
Trouble? Her conversational barbs were subtle, though, and since he had pretty
well earned them, he resolved to take them with good grace.
But still, eyeing his triple reflection, he had to ask her. "You're not playing
a trick on me, are you?"
"You'll be with Her Majesty, Declarant," Tusite replied coolly. He supposed that
meant no, it wasn't possible to embarrass Bruno without also embarrassing Tamra.
But there might be another barb here he was missing. This was typical; Tamra's
courtiers were mostly kind people, but their sparring was constant, driven by
hypertrophied senses of wit and honor and propriety. They were like athletes who
had honed a particular set of skills to the point of bodily distortion: runners
with cricket legs, or weightlifters who could no longer throw a ball. He could
believe Tusite had altogether lost the ability to speak plainly, without layers
of veiled meaning.
Bah.
Tonight, he'd balked at sequins, but had otherwise yielded judgment to the
palace and its ladies, who'd promptly swathed him in green-and-black suede.
Spurious zippers and snaps and buckles on the jacket were complemented by fat
laces down the trousers' outer seams. The matching hat was wide brimmed and
glossy, the sort of thing one expected a big ostrich feather to protrude from,
although none did.
Each piece had looked absurd in isolation, and Bruno had been hard-pressed to
stifle his protests. The total ensemble had a different effect, though. It did
look ridiculous, in the way that unfamiliar clothes always did, but it also
seemed, in a strange way, to suit him. If this was a joke, it was of the
contextual variety: well dressed but out of place. A time traveler. But probably
it was no joke, and people actually dressed this way these days.
The handmaids had wanted to stroke the gray out of his hair and beard as well,
and now, eyeing himself in the dressing hall's triple mirror, he wondered what
that might've looked like. No color was "natural" in this age of artifice, after
all, and his own tastes were clearly outdated and otherwise suspect.
"Whom are you trying to emulate?" the would-be teenage Tusite had asked him
earlier, her voice brusque with amusement. The question gave him pause. His
post-court appearance had evolved gradually, over twenty years, without much in
the way of conscious planning or assessment. And yet, as Tamra also had teased
him, he seemed to have become a sort of theatrical construct, less himself than
an iconification of himself. Symbolizing what, he couldn't guess, but there it
was: his eyes brooding between gray-black thickets, fat eyebrows merging with
overlong hair, bushy sideburns slopping down into curls of untamed beard. The
handmaids had done what they could in the time allotted, but still he looked
uncomfortably like a mad prophet, combed over but hardly couth. Strange that he
hadn't noticed it in his own mirror this morning.
That was court life for you: self-consciousness without end. Silly clothes.
Comments so veiled and obtuse that they might as well have been encrypted.
"You lookЕ better," Tamra told him, gliding in, dismissing her courtiers with a
look.
"Yes," he agreed grudgingly, straightening a blousy sleeve beneath the cuff of
the jacket. "I'm quite the dandy. Compliments to your software and staff; you do