"Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

“What was it like, being a goddess?”

“I am just a woman now, like any other,” I said. Ashok gave a soft harrumph, as if he had achieved a
very small enlightenment, and walked on, hands clasped behind his back. He may have spoken to me
once, twice before we reached the end of the Silk Wall and parted: I did not hear him, I did not hear the
music, I did not even hear the eternal thunder of Delhi’s traffic. The only sound in my head was the
high-pitched sound between my eyes of needing to cry but knowing I could not. Fat, selfish, gabbling,
Ashok had sent me back to the night I ceased to be a goddess.

Bare soles slapping the polished wood of the Kumari Ghar’s corridors. Running feet, muted shouts
growing ever more distant as I knelt, still unclothed for my Kumarima’s inspection, looking at the blood
drip from my smashed fingertip onto the painted wood floor. I remember no pain; rather, I looked at the
pain from a separate place, as if the girl who felt it were another person. Far far away, Smiling Kumarima
stood, held in time, hands to mouth in horror and guilt. The voices faded and the bells of Durbar Square
began to swing and toll, calling to their brothers across the city of Kathmandu until the valley rang from
Bhaktapur to Trisuli Bazaar for the fall of the Kumari Devi.

In the space of a single night, I became human again. I was taken to the Hanumandhoka—walking this
time like anyone else on the paving stones—where the priests said a final puja. I handed back my red
robes and jewels and boxes of make-up, all neatly folded and piled. Tall Kumarima had got me human
clothes. I think she had been keeping them for some time. The King did not come to say goodbye to me.
I was no longer his sister. But his surgeons had put my finger back together well, though they warned that
it would always feel a little numb and inflexible.

I left at dawn, while the street cleaners were washing down the stones of Durbar Square beneath the
apricot sky, in a smooth-running Royal Mercedes with darkened windows. My Kumarimas made their
farewells at the palace gate. Tall Kumarima hugged me briefly to her.
“Oh, there was so much more I needed to do. Well, it will have to suffice.”

I felt her quivering against me, like a bird too tightly gripped in a hand. Smiling Kumarima could not look
at me. I did not want her to.

As the car took me across the waking city I tried to understand how it felt to be human. I had been a
goddess so long I could hardly remember feeling any other way, but it seemed so little different that I
began to suspect that you are divine because people say you are. The road climbed through green
suburbs, winding now, growing narrower, busy with brightly decorated buses and trucks. The houses
grew leaner and meaner, to roadside hovels and chai-stalls and then we were out of the city—the first
time since I had arrived seven years before. I pressed my hands and face to the glass and looked down
on Kathmandu beneath its shroud of ochre smog. The car joined the long line of traffic along the narrow,
rough road that clung to the valley side. Above me, mountains dotted with goatherd shelters and stone
shrines flying tattered prayer banners. Below me, rushing cream-brown water. Nearly there. I wondered
how far behind me on this road were those other government cars, carrying the priests sent to seek out
little girls bearing the thirty-two signs of perfection. Then the car rounded the bend in the valley and I was
home, Shakya, its truck halts and gas station, the shops and the temple of Padma Narteswara, the dusty
trees with white rings painted around their trunks and between them the stone wall and arch where the
steps led down through the terraces to my house, and in that stone-framed rectangle of sky, my parents,
standing there side by side, pressing closely, shyly, against each other as I had last seen them lingering in
the courtyard of the Kumari Ghar.