"Liz Williams - La Malcontenta" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)
Liz Williams
From Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)
Liz Williams is the daughter of a conjuror and a Gothic novelist, and currently lives in Brighton,
England. She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge and her anti-career ranges
from reading tarot cards on Brighton pier to teaching in Central Asia. She currently writes full
time. Her novel The Ghost Sister was published by Bantam in July, 2001. Further novels include
Empire of Bones, The Poison Master, and Nine Layers of Sky, and Banner of Souls now out in the
USA with Bantam and the UK with Tor Macmillan.
Liz has had over 40 short stories published in Asimov's, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and The
Third Alternative, among others, and is co-editor of the recent anthology Fabulous Brighton. She
is also the current secretary of the Milford UK SF Writers' Workshop.
The coldest night of the year in Winterstrike is always the night on which the festival of Ombre is held, or
Wintervale if you are young and disdain the older dialects. The Matriarchy knows how to predict these
things, how to read the subtle signatures in snowdrifts and the length of icicles, the messages formed by
the freezing of the breath upon the air, the crackling of the icy skin of the great canals.
In the centre of Winterstrike, Mars' first city, in the middle of the meteorite crater that gave the city its
name, stands the fortress: a mass of vitrified stone as white as a bone and as red as a still-beating heart.
And at the top of the fortress, at the summit of a tower so high that from it one can see out across the
basalt walls to the dim, shimmering slopes of Olympus, stands a woman. She is surrounded by four glass
windows. She stands before a brazier and beneath a bell. She wears triple gloves: a thin membrane of
grandmother. In spite of this, and the spitting coals of the brazier, her hands are still cold.
When the day freezes below a certain point, and the signs are relayed to her, she turns, nearly
overthrowing the brazier in her haste, and rushes to the windows. She throws them open, letting in a great
gust of cold air which makes the coals crackle, then strikes the bell three times. It rings out, fracturing the
cold. The woman, Essegui Harn, runs down the stairs to the warm depths of the tower before the echo
has even died. One by one, the coals hiss into silence as the bell notes fade.
This takes place shortly before dawn, in the blue light before the sun rises. All Winterstrike can hear the
bell, except for one woman, and except for one woman, all Winterstrike answers. Women throw aside
their counterpanes, rush to the basins to wash, and then, still dressed in their nightclothes, run upstairs to
the attics of mansions, or downstairs to the cellars of community shacks, to retrieve costumes forgotten
over the course of the previous year, all six hundred and sixty-eight days of it. From chests and boxes,
they pull masks depicting the creatures of the Age of Children and the Lost Epoch, the long muzzles of
cenulae, or the narrow, lovely faces of demotheas and gaezelles. They try them on, laughing at one
another, then falling silent as they stand, their masked faces suddenly foolish above the thick nightdresses.
By Second Hour the robes, too, have been retrieved: confections of lace and metal, leather and stiffened
velvet, scarlet and ochre and amethyst, sea-green and indigo and pearl. Above these, the masks no
longer appear silly or sinister, but natural and full of grace. Then the women of Winterstrike set them
aside and, frantic throughout the short day, they make sweet dumplings and fire-cakes for the night
ahead, impatient for the fall of twilight.
Essegui Harn is in equal haste, rushing back to the mansion of Calmaretto, which lies not far from the
fortress. Essegui hurries through the streets, pounding snow into ice under her boots and churning it into
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