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

The sun blazed, the wagon creaked and shuddered. Vru
crouched near the master's canopy, his fur dripping with
sweat. His Ghennungs crawled through his fur, seeking
shade. Whenever one uprooted itself from his body, breaking
their connection, he felt the sudden loss of memories, like a
limb being torn away.
Not for the first time, Vru was forced to consider his
poverty. He had only five Ghennungs. Three had been with
him from birth; another had been his father's first; and the
oldest had belonged to both his father and his grandfather.
Once, when both of the older Ghennungs pulled their fangs
out of him to shuffle across his belly, sixty years of memoryтАФ
working stone, making love to his grandmother and his
mother, worrying over apprenticeships and duelsтАФwere gone,
and he had the strange and giddy feeling of knowing only his
body's own twenty years.
"Vile day," Khancriterquee said. The ancient godcarver,
sprawled on a pile of furs under the canopy, gestured with a
claw. "Vile sun. Boy! There's cooling oil in the crimson flask.
Smear some on me, and mind you don't spill any."
Vru found the oil and smeared it across his master's
ancient flesh. Khancriterquee was bloated; in patches, his fur
was gone. He stank like dead beasts rotting in the sun. Vru's
holding-hands shuddered to touch him. The master was
dying, and when he died, Vru's certain place in the world
would be gone.
Around Khancriterquee's neck, as around Vru's, Delighting-
In-Beauty hung from a leather cord: the plump, smooth,
3
 Embracing-The-New
by Benjamin Rosenbaum


laughing goddess, twenty-seven tiny Ghennungs dancing
upon her, carved in hard gray stone. Khancriterquee had
carved both copies. How strange, that the goddess of beauty
would create herself through his ugly, bloated flesh!
Khancriterquee's bloodshot eyes twitched open. "You are
not a godcarver," he croaked.
Vru held still. What had he done wrong? The master was
vainтАФhad he noticed Vru's disgust? Would Khancriterquee
send him back to his father's house in disgrace, to herd
fallowswine, to never marryтАФhoping, when his body was
decrepit, to find some nephew who would take pity on him
and accept a few of his memories?
"Do you know why we have won these territories?" the