"Sheri S. Tepper - The True Game 2 - Necromancer Nine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

mother said nonsense, the girl must be raped because it is the law."
I dropped the cup and heard it echo hollowly from under the bed where it rocked to and fro making
clanking sounds. "Raped! By whom?"
"By you, sir. Or, rather, by nobody."
I sat upon the side of the bed and reached for the cup with my foot. "Sylbie, pour more wine. Then
sit here beside me and tell me what you have just said. I am quite young, and I do not understand
anything you have said."
"Oh, sir," she said, falling to her knees to fetch the cup, "truly you are very stupid. I have already
told you. But I will tell you again."
"It was two years ago last Festival that the Necromancer came to Betand. He was an old man, and
he amused the crowd at the Festival by raising small spirits (some said it was forbidden for him to do so
during Festival, and was the cause of all our woe) which danced and sang like little windy shadows. Well,
one night he was drinking at the Dirty Girdle, a tavern which, my mother says, has a well deserved
reputation, and he got into an argument with the tavern keeper, a man as foul of mouth as his kitchen
floor, so says my mother. Doryon, the Necromancer, would not take besting in any battle of words, so
my father says, and so decided to place a haunting upon the tavern. He was very drunk, sir, very drunk.
"So he rose to his feet and made some gestures, speaking some certain words, at which, so my
father says, the whole company within the place trembled, for he had summoned up a monstrous spirit
which fulminated and gorbled in the middle of the air, spinning. Then, so my father says, did the old
Necromancer clutch at his chest and fall like an axed tree down, straight, stiff as a dried fish and dead as
one, too.
"But the haunting he had raised up went on boiling and fetching, sir, growing darker and mere roily
until at last it began to howl, and it howled its way out of the tavern and into the streets of Betand where
it has howled and howled until this night."
"But," I said, "why was not some other Necromancer brought to settle the revenant? What one can
raise, surely another can put down. Or so I have always been taught."
"Sir, it was thought so. But Doryon was very drunk, and the Necromancers who came after said he
had raised no dead spirit from the past but had, instead, raised up some spirit yet unborn, twisted in time
and brought untimely to Betand. None of them knew how to twist it out of being and into the future
again."
"So. And so. And so what is the what of that?" I was baffled, mystified. "What has that to do with
being raped because it is the law?"
She shook her head at me as though I should have seen the whole matter clearly by this time. "If it is
the spirit of one unborn, then it is in the interest of the city that it become born as soon as possible. Which
means that every woman of Betand able to bear must bear at every opportunity."
"But rape," I protested feebly. "Why?"
"Because all sexual congress except between married persons is defined as rape in the laws of
Betand. Marriages cannot be entered into lightly for mere convenience. There are matters of property, of
family, of alliance. It takes years, sometimes, to work out the agreements and settlements and the
contracts."
 "So they expect me to rape you, to break the laws of the city?"
"Oh, truly you are very stupid, sir. Nobody will break the laws. Did they not say you were nobody?
How can nobody break a law? It is manifestly impossible, so says my mother. We of Betand do not
change our laws readily, so says my father, but we interpret them to our needs."
"I see. At least, I think I see." I was not sure, but it had begun to make a weird kind of sense.
"I hope so," she said, wearily taking off her jacket. "You look far less dirty than the drover."
Removing her blouse, "That is, if one may choose among nobodies."
My throat was dry. I could think of nothing to say to her, nothing at all. While I poured wine and
drank it, she removed all of her clothing except a filmy thing which began halfway down her front and
ended above her knees. It did little to hide the rest of her. Knowing my history, you will believe it when I