"End of the World Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grimwood Jon Courtenay)

CHAPTER 15 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

Lady Neku walked very slowly round herself as she’d been two years earlier. It was a salutary lesson. Her eyes were instantly forgettable, and if she had shape beneath those cheeks, it was only because bones were a biological necessity, required to keep her smug little face from collapsing.

Average height, slightly above average weight, her shoulders accentuated the broadness of her back; even her breasts managed to be too large for her age, while being too small for the ribs over which they lay.

As for her pubic hair.

This grew like lichen, if lichen was black and wiry and glinted in the castle’s light. She’d hated that body and still did, but today’s hatred was as nothing to what she felt when it was first presented to her. It was only after Lady Neku killed herself for the third time that her mother agreed she could change.

“Shit,” she said, kicking the thing.

The glass tube in which it floated rang like a bell.

At the age of three, Lady Neku had blonde hair and eyes the colour of a cold summer sky. At five, her hair was silver, like the spires of High Strange seen on a cloudless night and her eyes the amber of a Baltic morning.

Her mother loved her best between those two ages, and looking at herself Lady Neku could understand why. She’d been beautiful, a faithful shadow, willing to trot from meeting to meeting or sit in silence while Lady Katchatka worked at her desk.

At nine, Lady Neku had black hair, white skin, and brown eyes. It was a very ordinary look. A transition point between the fading prettiness of her seven-year-old self and the cruel plainness of her body aged eleven. Lady Neku knew exactly why this had happened. Her mother could forgive anything except competition for attention from Antonio, Nico, and Petro.

Lady Neku’s whole history was in the figures who stood blank-eyed and empty before her. The tiny, blonde-haired infant, the silver-haired girl…She could take any of them back, revert to the child she’d once been. Five orphaned bodies, neither living nor dead, just existing at the point where she abandoned them.

She’d taken this body she wore. At least, Lady Neku was pretty sure she had. Walked out of the night and into a squalid little house. A dozen faces had watched as she looked round the tiny room and chose a girl of roughly her own age.

“You’re bleeding,” they said, rising from the table. And then one of them realised who Lady Neku was and concern turned to fear.

“Don’t,” they said.

“Take me instead,” said one. A woman who looked old enough to be Lady Neku’s mother, though she was probably no older than her visitor. Time was counted differently among fugees.

“Please,” said the woman. “Choose me.”

“I’m sorry,” Lady Neku said. “You’re not the one I want.” And she walked round to the far side of the table, where three children sat frozen on a bench. The youngest, a boy of about ten, stood to defend his sister and Lady Neku felt a tightness in her throat and tears come into her own eyes.

So brave, so stupid.

When she put her fingers to the boy’s temples, it was gently, and she lowered him to the dirt so he didn’t bang his head on the way down.

His mind was simple, barely more than a single emotion and the most banal level of self knowledge…fugees and family shared their origins, but at times like this even Lady Neku had trouble believing them the same.

“I’ll bring her back,” Lady Neku told the mother.

“As what?” It seemed the girl’s father had finally found his voice. “What will she be?” He glared at his wife. “We don’t want her back, you understand…we won’t take her.”

Touching the girl on her shoulder, Lady Neku led her from the house, leaving the family arguing behind her. They were dirt poor, they had to be. Anyone richer would have been somewhere else. Only the poor still lived near the surface, where even the thickest ceilings struggled to keep back the heat outside and where fugees went unprotected from people like her.

It hurt Lady Neku to think of herself as a predator. “Guardians,” she said to the girl. “Custodians.”

These words were unknown to the child.

“Keepers,” said Lady Neku.

She understood that one.

“What’s your name?”

“Mai…”

“Well, Mai, I’m not going to hurt you,” Lady Neku promised. “And I’ll bring you back…”

Mai chewed her lip while she considered what the keeper said. The girl was sweet and simple, the blood flushing her filthy cheeks a saline echo of the sea that originally spawned all life. For a fugee she was almost beautiful. Compared to Lady Neku, she was the drabbest moth to a butterfly.

“Really?” said Mai.

“Promise,” Lady Neku said, reaching out to touch the girl’s cheek. Without even knowing it, she lied.