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

among the stepped towers of the dhokas. Her husband had died of lung cancer from pollution and cheap
Indian cigarettes. Her two tall sons were grown and married with children of their own, older than me. In
that time she had mothered five Kumari Devis before me.

Next I remember Smiling Kumarima. She was short and round and had breathing problems for which she
used inhalers, blue and brown. I would hear the snake hiss of them on days when Durbar Square was
golden with smog. She lived out in the new suburbs up on the western hills, a long journey even by the
royal car at her service. Her children were twelve, ten, nine, and seven. She was jolly and treated me like
her fifth baby, the young favorite, but I felt even then that, like the demon-dancing-men, she was scared
of me. Oh, it was the highest honor any woman could hope for, to be the mother of the goddess—so to
speak—though you wouldn’t think it to hear her neighbors in the unit, shutting yourself away in that
dreadful wooden box, and all the blood, medieval, medieval, but they couldn’t understand.
Somebody had to keep the king safe against those who would turn us into another India, or worse,
China; someone had to preserve the old ways of the divine kingdom. I understood early that difference
between them. Smiling Kumarima was my mother out of duty. Tall Kumarima from love.

I never learned their true names. Their rhythms and cycles of shifts waxed and waned through the days
and nights like the faces of the moon. Smiling Kumarima once found me looking up through the lattice of
a jali screen at the fat moon on a rare night when the sky was clear and healthy and shouted me away,
don’t be looking at that thing, it will call the blood out of you, little devi, and you will be the devi
no more.

Within the wooden walls and iron rules of my Kumari Ghar, years become indistinguishable, indistinct. I
think now I was five when I became Taleju Devi. The year, I believe, was 2034. But some memories
break the surface, like flowers through snow.

Monsoon rain on the steep-sloped roofs, water rushing and gurgling through the gutters, and the shutter
that every year blew loose and rattled in the wind. We had monsoons, then. Thunder demons in the
mountains around the city, my room flash lit with lightning. Tall Kumarima came to see if I needed singing
to sleep but I was not afraid. A goddess cannot fear a storm.

The day I went walking in the little garden, when Smiling Kumarima let out a cry and fell at my feet on the
grass and the words to tell her to get up, not to worship me were on my lips when she held, between
thumb and forefinger, twisting and writhing and trying to find a place for its mouth to seize: a green leech.

The morning Tall Kumarima came to tell me people had asked me to show myself. At first I had thought
it wonderful that people would want to come and look at me on my little jharoka balcony in my clothes
and paint and jewels. Now I found it tiresome; all those round eyes and gaping mouths. It was a week
after my tenth birthday. I remember Tall Kumarima smiled but tried not to let me see. She took me to
the jharoka to wave to the people in the court and I saw a hundred Chinese faces upturned to me, then
the high, excited voices. I waited and waited but two tourists would not go away. They were an ordinary
couple, dark local faces, country clothes.

“Why are they keeping us waiting?” I asked.

“Wave to them,” Tall Kumarima urged. “That is all they want.” The woman saw my lifted hand first. She
went weak and grabbed her husband by the arm. The man bent to her, then looked up at me. I read
many emotions on that face; shock, confusion, recognition, revulsion, wonder, hope. Fear. I waved and
the man tugged at his wife, look, look up. I remember that against all the laws, I smiled. The woman
burst into tears. The man made to call out but Tall Kumarima hastened me away.