"Geoff Ryman - The Unconquered Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ryman Geoff)

Third's mother eased her away from the window.
The Neighbors came for a visit. They took swigs of water from Third's cup. "We
are your friends," they told Third's mother, and requisitioned the rice she had not
hidden. They told her to save her menstrual blood. Third's mother dipped and
bowed to them, hands high over head. She smiled. When they were gone, she pulled
Third to her, and hugged her, and her hands were trembling. Third listened to the
Neighbors un-der her house, chasing her White Ladies. They were taking them
away.
"They are going to do something with our blood," said Third's mother. "They want
to weaken the male power of our men."
They slaughtered ten of the old houses. Third's own house began to make a new
noise, a wheedling noise, tightly constrained. The walls shook delicately. Third's
mother risked looking out of the window, and saw them hacking at the carcass of
their cousin's house. The new little white house lay by its side. The Neigh-bors
began to erect new, dead houses that could not walk to other valleys.


The houses
"There is nothing for us here," said Third's mother. In the night, she parceled up the
stove, and a pot, and their rice, and she led her children away from the village.
They had to leave their old caring house behind. They tethered it to a stake. It knew
it was being left, and couldn't understand why. As they crept away it began to bellow
after them, tugging at the line that held it. Deserted houses sometimes died of love.
"Go!" whispered Third's mother, and pushed her, and gave her another nudge when
Third turned around. "Keep going! Don't look back even if I fall down." They heard
the Neighbors call to each other. They sounded like dogs barking. Third and her
family flitted into the shadow of the trees and waited until their house fell silent. Then
they moved on.
They went, like everyone else, to the city. Third's mother carried them most of the
way on her back.
There would have been flowers at the wedding of Third's cousin. Years later, she
still found herself look-ing forward to it. All the village girls would have been linked
together by a chain of flowers. Third would have tended the bride.
The villagers grew the flowers, lotuses, along the borders of the rice paddies. The
flowers were not picked, except for special occasions. In the mornings the lotuses
would be open wide; by noon they would be shut. There had been a medium in the
village who claimed she had the soul of a prince who was in turn possessed by the
soul of a sorcerer. Third had once seen her eat a glass cup to prove it, crunching it
in her mouth. Each house had a shrine to the Buddha, which was exchanged each
month with a different house.
The People sang when they spoke. The language was tonal; melody carried meaning.
The numbers sang too. The yarrow would be cast into patterns that were tones.
They seemed to speak. They turned into songs. They were feast songs, work songs,
cooking songs, cast by the yarrow. Everyone sang them. Long afterward, Third
would find herself humming them. She no longer knew what they meant. She had
forgot-ten the words and the numbers. But they still mur-mured to her, like voices in
memory.
Her name was a spell, a number, and Third's mother only had to say it, to remember
tigers. As they fled from the village, Third and her family were in terror of tigers.
Where they slept, Third's mother made a fire against them.