"Ken Rand - Pheonix" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ken)

“I beg your—"

“You counted seventeen, not three hands and—"

“I-I'm sorry, Mother, I..."

“Don't apologize, Lisan Navarroclan.” The Holy Mother took Lisan's youthful, smooth hand in her bony,
aged one and pressed gently. Lisan liked it when she touched her—it felt like her own mother's touch.

She fought back that memory; her mother had been dead only two hands and—no—twelve—nights.

“Seventeen,” she said, and returned the handclasp, warm skin against warm skin.

Lisan wanted to ask the Holy Mother what had prompted this sudden bout of illness. A memory would
surface, or somebody would say something, or she'd find something left over from the rebellion in the dirt
in a collapsed corridor. Or something. Always something preceded each attack.

The last one had been one hand—five—nights ago. The Holy Mother had visited Cousin Michael
Riosclan's alcove. Her unannounced visit, no reason given, surprised Michael as he tended his tomato
plant. When she saw the plant, the Holy Mother had collapsed in pain. Lisan tended to her, popped a
sapbalm into her quivering mouth, and the episode passed. The Holy Mother left Michael's alcove, left
him stunned, speechless, left without explanation.

It was as if the Holy Mother had never seen a tomato plant, and Lisan realized maybe she never had. If
she had, it had been so long ago, was buried so deep in her memory that it hurt her physically to recall it.

She had tried to ask about the tomato plant, as gently as possible, but the Holy Mother seemed not to
hear. She sat for hours after the incident, silent, on the bench where they now rested, gazing out at the
empty desert grassland to the west, where her memories, Lisan knew, were not really buried.

The next night, Holy Mother had asked for a cutting. She had her own tomato plant now, in its pot by the
door.

What if nothing now causes the attacks? What if—

Lisan scowled at the shadowy thought like she would at a furtive bist gnawing a mealsack—What if the
Holy Mother Anna Devlin is...dying?—and pushed it away. She imagined, as she did so, that this must
be like the way the Holy Mother controlled her memories. Or, too often, didn't.

She put her arm around Anna and squeezed those warm, bony shoulders, as she would have done with
any Cousin. Lisan gazed out, too, gazed in companionable silence into the night. The flat plain of
whipgrass below, a star-filled bowl of the sky above.

No questions, not now. Just her with me, just us, like Cousins. Together.

The Holy Mother's alcove had been chosen, by popular acclaim, to give her a view of the west. It was
the coolest alcove in Tierra Natal, the nearest to a well; and the First Grandfather himself used to occupy
it. First Gran was dead, as were all the other adults in Tierra Natal. He had died three nights ago, the last
of the adults to go. The children, who numbered double-twice two hands and nine fingers—no,