"Chronicles of Chaos 01 - Orphans of Chaos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wright John C)

Vanity was of the opinion that if we did not know where the boundary was, it could not affect us.
Her argument ran along these lines: we had been warned something bad would happen to us if we went over the boundaries, or tarried too long on the far side. But boundaries do not exist in the material world. A rock or a tree on one side or the other of an imaginary line is still a rock or a tree, is it not?
Therefore the boundaries only exist, as Vanity put it, "in our fancy."
"Think of it this way," she would say, between various ejaculations and digressions. "If everyone woke up tomorrow and agreed we should spell 'dog' C-A-T, why, dogs would be cats as far as we could tell. But the dogs would not care what we called them. If everyone woke up and said, 'Vanity is the Queen of England!' why, men, I'd be the Queen of England, provided the army and the tax gatherers were among the people who said it. If only half the army said it, we'd have a civil war."
The boundary to the South was no different. As one moved Soum there were trees upon the soum lawn, a few, and then more, and then scattered copses, then thick copses. At some point, you would find yourself in a place with no grass under-foot, where no one had stepped before, and see trees which had never felt the bite of an axe. But where exactly was the dividing line?
The trees were thick around the servants' quarters, the stables, and the pump house. They were thicker beyond the old brick smithy. They were thicker still beyond the even older green mound connected with local King Artiiur tales; but mat mound was bare of trees itself, and one came from the shadows of silent leaves into a wide round area of surprising sunlight, where four standing stones held a tilted slab high above wild grass. The stones were gray, and no moss grew on them, and no sunlight ever seemed to warm them.
Vanity said that Arthur's Table clearly could not be in the for-est, because there were no trees there. A forest, by definition (Vanity would exclaim) was a place full of trees, wasn't it?
So (she would conclude triumphantly), there was no South-ern boundary, provided we all agreed that there was none. What other people said amongst themselves was their own affair.
Colin would ask sarcastically, "And when they send Mr. Glum and his savage dog to hunt us down and maul us, does it then, at some point, become our affair?"
Vanity would roll her eyes and say, "If the dog mauls us on this side of the boundary, we could still say he was on the other side, couldn't we? Things like boundaries don't exist if you don't see them when you look for them, do they?"
"And I guess dog fangs don't exist if you don't feel it when your arm gets ripped off, right?"
"Exactly! Suppose the dog only thought he mauled us, but we did not see him nor feel him when he came to attack us! How do you know the dog hadn't just dreamed or imagined he attacked us? We could agree he hadn't done it, couldn't we? We could even agree the dog had agreed not to hunt us!"
Colin would respond with something like, "Why bother ar-guing with me? Why don't you just agree that I agree, so that, in your world, I have?"
Vanity would rejoin, "Because I prefer to agree that you ar-gued and you lost, as anyone who heard the dumb things you say would agree."
Colin was not one to give up easily. "If you merely dreamed you had found a secret way out of here, that would not let you walk through a solid stone wall, would it?"
"Of course not. But no one knows which walls are solid and which are hollow because no one can see the inside of the solid ones, can they? The ones you can see inside aren't hollow, are they? No one else has any proof one way or another."
Vanity's argument was as incomprehensible as Quentin's, and as brief (when pared down) as Victor's. Apparently as long as she, Vanity, in her solipsistic purity, did not believe the Southern boundary existed, then, for all practical purposes, it would not. 6.
Vanity was short, redheaded, with a dusting of freckles on her cheeks. Her eyes were the most enormous emerald, and they sparkled. She had a little upturned snub nose I always envied just a bit. She was fair skinned and always wore a straw skim-mer to keep the sun off her face.
With her lips so pale a rose color, and her eyebrows so light, I always thought she looked like a statue of fine brass, held in a furnace of flame so hot as to be invisible, so that she seemed to glow. Even when frowning, she seemed to be smiling.
She was curvy and she took wry amusement at the fact that the boys, the male teachers, even Mr. Glum, could have their gazes magnetized by her when she walked by.
I always drought Vanity was a little sweet on Colin, because she yelled at him and called him names. In me romances I read, that was a sure sign of growing affection.
As I grew older, I noticed how carefully she noticed every-ming Quentin did, Quentin the quiet one, and I realized she doted on him. And I began to realize Vanity actually was annoyed and exasperated by Colin.
That was when I realized, for me first time, mat the five of us were not me tightly knit band of Three Musketeers Plus Two mat Victor said we were, one for all and all for one, and all that.
It was not until I was around an age which, in a human being, would be between sixteen or eighteen or so, when I had the drought mat wim two girls and three boys, one of the boys in our merry band would end up a bachelor, or married to a stranger.
I remember where I was when mis drought came to me. I was sitting on me lip of me Kissing Well, wim my skirts flapping in the gusts coming from the bay, quite alone. I had just come from the infirmary, and was still seasick from Dr. Fell's most recent round of vaccinations. We were usually allowed to skip lessons any afternoon when Dr. Fell worked on us, provided we made up the lessons later. The well was high on a hillside, and overlooked me water. Sea mews were crying, and me sad sound lingered in the air.
It was spring, I remember, and two male birds were fighting. That was what prompted my drought. That was also when I started wondering what my future would be. I wanted to be a pilot, an explorer. A cowgirl witii a pistol. Anything that got me away from here. The idea of being a housewife seemed intolerably dull and lacking in glamour. On the other hand, the idea of never having a child was like death.
And then I said aloud to the well, "But what if they never let us go?"
The voice in the well said back softly, "... never let us go...?"
7.
My name is Amelia Armstrong Windrose. I should say, I call myself that; my real name was lost with my parents.
We chose our own names when we were eight or ten or so. It was not until we started sneaking off the estate grounds that we realized that other children in the village were christened at birth, and kept anniversaries of their birthdays, and knew their ages.
We knew about birthdays from various readings, of course. There were references to such things from histories, where boy kings had to be killed before they ascended the throne, or from gothic romances, where girl heirs had to be wedded before they came into their majority. We knew, in a general way, what a birthday party was.
Mrs. Wren started holding them for us, with snappers and barkers and wrapped gifts, and candles on cake with icing, and toasts and games, when we complained. But her notion was to have them twice or three times a year, usually during months with no other holidays of note. And the number of candles she put on the cake could be anywhere from one to one score, de-pending on her mood, or the success of her shopping.
The gifts we got from her did not seem odd at the time, for we had no other basis of comparison. Once I got a wrapped roast duck, which had turned cold in me cardboard box, and lay amid its own congealed grease. Another time, a box of nails.
Colin got one of Mrs. Wren's shoes at that same party; Van- ity got a drawer from the kitchen with knives and spoons in it. And yet, other times, her gifts were things of wonder and plea-sure: a wooden rocking horse, painted fine, brave colors; a toy train set with an electric motor and a cunning little chimney that puffed real smoke; a dress of breathtaking beauty, made of a soft scarlet fabric, perhaps satin; an orb of pale crystal that glowed like a firefly when you held it in your hand and thought warm thoughts; a walking stick with a carved jackal head with silver ears, which Quentin was convinced could find buried streams and fountains underground.
One birthday party, the Headmaster simply announced we were to choose names for ourselves, and put our baby-names behind us. Only Quentin refused to choose, and kept his original name. I, who had been Secunda, used the chance to name myself after my heroine, the American aviatrix, Amelia Earhart My family name I took from that eight-pointed star which decorates maps and determines North.
You see, I had always felt closed-in and trapped by the walls and boundaries of our estate. No matter how handsome and fine the grounds, it was still a cage to me. My dreams were for far, unguessed horizons, hidden springs of unknown rivers, un-climbed mountains shrouded in cloud. The edges of maps interested me more than the middles.
Naturally, such dreams led me to admire that breed of men who sailed those horizons, found those springs, conquered those mountains. Roald Admussen was my idol, along with Hanno, Leif Erickson, and Sir Francis Drake. My favorite books from Edgar Rice Burroughs were those where the lost city of Ophir appeared.
Amelia Earhart seemed so brave and gay, her smile so cheer-ful and fearless, in the one picture in the little encyclopedia entry I found of her, mat only she could be my namesake.
I told myself she had not been lost at sea, but had discovered some tropic island so fair and so like Eden, that she landed her plane at once, knowing no one else would ever be daring and cunning enough to find the route she had flown. All the years that had gone by, with her still not found, seemed to confirm my theory.
My name, invented when I was perhaps a twelve-year-old, may seem silly now. But I console myself that young Tertia named herself after a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, so that she could be called Miss Fair. We are lucky she did not end up called Miss Pride N. Prejudice.
8.
I cannot describe myself except to say that I am either very vain or very beautiful, and that I hope I am the latter, while suspecting I may be the former. My hair is blond, beyond shoulder length, and I liked to wear it queued up and out of the way. My complexion has been tanned by spending much time out of doors in the wind and weather.
I always had the idea, when I was young, that if I stared in the mirror long enough at some feature, my lips or eyes, some sun freckles I did not care for, or a mole, I could somehow, by force of will, "stare" my face to a more perfect shapeЧclearer skin, higher cheekbones, eyes greener, or more long-lashed, perhaps slightly tilted and exotic.
And because this does indeed describe me, then as now, I had always had the unspoken, haughty assumption that plain girls either lacked willpower, or lacked imagination. It is my least attractive feature, this prejudice against the unsightly, and it is based on a very wrong notion of what life is like for normal people. It gives me no pleasure to notice that many normal people have the selfsame prejudice against the plain, but with far less reason than I.
I am tall. Rather, I should say, I am tall for a girl, but I hope you will understand me if I say I was taller when I was younger. Everyone but Primus, who became Victor Invictus Triumph, was smaller than me, and I could outrun and outwrestle my two younger brothers. 9.
I remember the day when Quartinus, who turned into Colin Ib-lis mac FirBolg, proved he could master me. There was some quarrel over who was to pluck apples from the tree, and I threw one at his head hard enough to raise a bruise. He grinned, as he did when he was angry, and chased me down. You see, I laughed because the last time we had raced, I had beaten him. Now he tackled me, rolled me on the ground, and took my hair in one hand to yank my head backЧsomething he would never have done to a boy. Still, I grinned, because the last time we fought, I had toppled him downhill.
And so I struck and I wrestled and I pushed and I kicked, but my blows seemed, by some magic, to have been robbed of their force. Just one year before, he had been a child, and I could bully him. Where had my strength gone?
He pinned my wrists to the ground, and knelt on my legs to prevent me from kicking. Suddenly, the game turned into something serious, mysterious, and somehow horrible. I writhed and struggled in his grasp, and I somehow knew, knew beyond doubt, that I would never be stronger than a man again. Not ever.
Colin smiled, and ordered me to apologize, and he bent his head forward to stare into my eyes. I wonder if he was trying to awe me with his frowning gaze, to hypnotize me with his luminous blue eyes.