"Benjamin Rosenbaum - Embracing The New" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenbaum Benjamin)

power. We will be one person. And then we will carve as
Delighting-In-Beauty guides our hand.
Vru could smell, faintly, the decaying odor of
Khancriterquee's skin from where he stood. The master was
dying, but the master would not die. He would not even
change much. Vru knew his five weak Ghennungs would be
no match for Khancriterquee's sixteen, his own memories dim
whispers in a roaring. Some would perhaps be weeded out,
for twenty-one is too many for even a young body to carry.
Something might remain: Vru's industriousness, perhaps, his
love of textures in the stone. But when he thought of
Khancriterquee cutting off the head of the Bereft in the
mines, it would be sixteen loud voices of satisfaction, perhaps
three of weak dismay.
14
 Embracing-The-New
by Benjamin Rosenbaum


He should be happy. His god was Delighting-In-Beauty.
Why should he not rejoice that the greatest godcarver of the
Godly would work with his muscles, his claws, creating
grandeur? What did it matter if his memories were
dissipated? He remembered seeing himself as a mewling baby
in his Mother's holding-hands: a ninth, unwanted son. He
remembered stroking his Mother's brow as she held the
infant. "There will be no inheritance for him," she had said.
"We will find something," he had said. "Perhaps the
priesthood. He will have one of my Ghennungs." "Two,"
Mother had said. He had scowled down at the crying, wan
baby and thought, two? For this scrawny fish?
Vru endured the applause and shuffled back to sit beside
Khancriterquee. The stench was overpowering.
This scrawny fish will never make a soldier, his father had
thought.
I would rather be Godless, Vru realized. I would rather die
once, and then fully, than become Khancriterquee.
****


"Let the verdict of the Oracle be pronounced for all to
hear," said the crier. "The crime is treason, heresy, and
attempted desertion to the enemy. The body is not at fault,
and will be spared, but is unfit to bear memory. Let it be
banished to the wilds. Generous is the Oracle."
They held him, but Vru would not struggle. He was limp
and sweaty. He looked at his chest; how strange not to see
Delighting-In-Beauty there. He felt like a child again.