"Jay Lake - Will You go On" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

You Will Go On

Jay Lake

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There are many mansions in this house, and this house is as great as the world, as
old as the sky. What would you do with a man who fell to the floor from an empty
ceiling? Where would you go if you had every room that ever was to choose from?

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IT’S LONELY HERE IN GOD’S HOUSE. Though we prey as hard as we can, and
eat what we kill, He rarely hears our words. Maybe He’s busy out in the world
somewhere. Sometimes we hear hammering and saws, the workmen who we never
see changing the house. Maybe He’s one of them.

Maybe He’s one of us.

Whoever, He’s not telling. But I’m not asking anymore, either.

There came a day during my seventeenth year when the Hunt Group—that’s
our tribe—found a man from outside. It happens sometimes. Old Jamie’s father’s
father was from outside. He’d come into God’s house wearing steel and linen,
carrying a long pole with an axe on the end. We kept the weapon stashed in a closet
in the Upper West Red Gallery these days. Though his name was lost to us now,
half the Hunt Group has that outsider’s brown eyes and dark, bristly hair.

Old Jamie always swore some of our words came in with his granddaddy’s
steel, but I never believed that. When God made us He gave us words with which to
find our purpose. Our words are His. How could they have come from outside?

This new man from outside fell from a high window in the Hall of Kings. The
Hunt Group was there looking for the giant rats that slip between the huge, tapering
pillars. The pillars were like vases, or urns, sixty feet tall—rough stone painted with
ocher and brown, holding up wooden beams bigger around even than Marta Grande
when she was pregnant. The stone walls of the Hall of Kings were rough too, with
tiny windows up near the top no one could reach without ladders or scaffolds or
ropes.

It all looked and felt real old. Like one of His first efforts maybe, before He’d
discovered crown molding and lath-and-plaster. We called it the Hall of Kings on
account of the huge statue at the east end, a man almost as high as the ceiling sitting
on a stool that was little to him, with a square beard and a low cap and a big, curvy
sword, all out of the same rough stone. Two wide copper trays on poles, like
braziers but too shallow and high up, always burned with a smelly, flickering flame to
each side of the statue. They almost made up for the thin light from the tiny
windows.