"Kathleen Ann Goonan - The Bones of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

forbade human sacrifice a hundred years ago. Her stomach
clenched.
 “What are you doing here?” she demanded, unafraid suddenly.
She was heir to the throne of Hawaii; he was most properly her
subject. “Are you the one who is killing my mother?”
The nurse turned, shot her a look of raw fear behind the kahuna’s
back, and crossed herself. Likelike opened her mouth, but no words
came out. Kaiulani stood very straight and grasped her mother’s
hand.
“No,” said the old man, his voice unusually melodious, yet studied
and calm. He beckoned. Kaiulani stayed put.
“Go,” whispered her mother.
Kaiulani took one step only toward him.
“Touch these,” he said. “They are the sacred bones of King
Kamehameha, from whom you are descended.”
Kaiulani shook her head. Related, and only through
Kamehameha’s cousin. She knew her genealogy well.
“Do as he says,” Likelike commanded, her voice surprisingly
strong.
Kaiulani hesitated, then knelt, her full skirts billowing on the
floor. She brushed one of the bones swiftly with her fingertips.
The kahuna caught her hand and yanked it toward him, pressed
it beneath his onto the jumble of bones and held it down with
surprising strength. The bones were neither warm nor cold to touch.
“This is your baptism, your initiation,” he said. “Not the haole
one, the Christian one. You are our last hope, the last hope of all
Hawaiians. You are half haole, but you are our last alii, our last
royal child. Our people have a life, which you are bound to preserve.
Our people have a land, which you are bound to preserve for them.”
Tears glimmered in his dark eyes and he seemed unashamed as
they overflowed and traced glistening trails on his withered cheeks.
The room stilled utterly, as if the ceaseless trades had stopped, as if
time itself were holding its breath.
And then the cries of the peacocks that roamed the grounds burst
forth, loud and dreadful, even in this closed room.
Mad, sudden dreams rose all around Kaiulani, rushed toward
her, enveloped her. Foreign cities shimmered, color and sound like a
blow, so strange that she barely grasped that each one was a city
before it faded into the inevitable next: new streets, new canals, new
rushing crowds. Flames, screams and horror; buildings crumbling,
strange gray battleships exploding against the unmistakable
background of the Koolau Mountains, and burning men leaping
from them into the deep, crystal-clear harbor into which the Pearl
River flowed. Festivals of gay music, grim hordes marching. Was
this her world? For an instant a small girl lay gasping for life in
her arms, a red gash in her side soaking her clothing. Small poor
shacks were crowded with ragged beggars next to impossible glass
towers. Between the carnage flashed scenes of sanguine
beauty—billowing green forests, wide, slow rivers weaving through
grassy plains, a small golden island topped with sparkling coconut