"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen - Old Music and the Slave Women" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

from under him so that he fell sprawling, they slammed the door and left him belly-down on stone in darkness.
He dropped his forehead onto his arm and lay shivering, hearing his breath catch in a whimper again and again.
 Later on he remembered that night, and other things from the next days and nights. He did not know, then or later, if
was tortured in order to break him down or was merely the handy object of aimless brutality and spite, a sort of playthin
the boys. There were kicks, beatings, a great deal of pain, but none of it was clear in his memory later except the
crouchcage.
He had heard of such things, read about them. He had never seen one. He had never been inside a compound.
Foreigners, visitors, were not taken into slave quarters on the estates of Voe Deo. They were served by house-slaves in
houses of the owners.
This was a small compound, not more than twenty huts on the women's side, three longhouses on the gate side. It h
housed the staff of a couple of hundred slaves who looked after the house and the immense gardens of Yaramera. They
would have been a privileged set compared to the field hands. But not exempt from punishment. The whipping post still
near the high gate that sagged open in the high walls.
"There?" said Nemeo, the one who always twisted his arm, but the other one, Alatual, said, "No, come on, it's over
here," and ran ahead, excited, to winch the crouchcage down from where it hung below the main sentry station, high up
the inside of the wall.
It was a tube of coarse, rusty steel mesh sealed at one end and closable at the other. It hung suspended by a single
from a chain. Lying on the ground it looked like a trap for an animal, not a very big animal. The two young men stripped
his clothes and goaded him to crawl into it headfirst, using the fieldhandlers, electric prods to stir up lazy slaves, which th
had been playing with the last couple of days. They screamed with laughter, pushing him and jabbing the prods in his anu
and scrotum. He writhed into the cage until he was crouching in it head down, his arms and legs bent and jammed up int
body. They slammed the trap end shut, catching his naked foot between the wires and causing a pain that blinded him w
they hoisted the cage back up. It swung about wildly, and he clung to the wires with his cramped hands. When he opene
eyes he saw the ground swinging about seven or eight meters below him. After a while the lurching and circling stopped
could not move his head at all. He could see what was below the crouchcage, and by straining his eyes round he could
most of the inside of the compound.
In the old days there had been people down there to see the moral spectacle, a slave in the crouchcage. There had
children to learn the lesson of what happens to a housemaid who shirked a job, a gardener who spoiled a cutting, a han
talked back to a boss. Nobody was there now. The dusty ground was bare. The dried-up garden plots, the little gravey
the far edge of a woman's side, the ditch between the two sides, the pathways, a vague circle of greener grass right
underneath him, all were deserted. His torturers stood around for a while laughing and talking, got bored, went off.
He tried to ease his position but could move only very slightly. Any motion made the cage rock and swing so that he
grew sick and increasingly fearful of falling. He did not know how securely the cage was balanced on that single hook. H
foot, caught in the cage closure, hurt so sharply that he longed to faint, but though his head swam he remained consciou
tried to breathe as he had learned how to breathe a long time ago on another world, quietly, easily. He could not do it h
now in this world in this cage. His lungs were squeezed in his rib cage so that each breath was extremely difficult. He trie
to suffocate. He tried not to panic. He tried to be aware, only to be aware, but awareness was unendurable.
When the sun came round to that side of the compound and shone full on him the dizziness turned to sickness. Some
then he fainted for a while.
There was night and cold and he tried to imagine water, but there was no water.
He thought later he had been in the crouchcage two days. He could remember the scraping of the wires on his sunb
naked flesh when they pulled him out, the shock of cold water played over him from a hose. He had been fully aware fo
moment then, aware of himself, like a doll, lying small, limp, on dirt, while men above him talked and shouted about
something. Then he must have been carried back to the cell or stable where he was kept, for there was dark and silence
also he was still hanging in the crouchcage roasting in the icy fire of the sun, freezing in his burning body, fitted tighter and
tighter into the exact mesh of the wires of pain.
At some point he was taken to a bed in a room with a window, but he was still in the crouchcage, swinging high abo
the dusty ground, the dusties' ground, the circle of green grass.
The zadyo and the heavyset man were there, were not there. A bondswoman, whey-faced, crouching and trembling
him trying to put salve on his burned arm and leg and back. She was there and not there. The sun shone in the window.