"Sheri S. Tepper - Singer from the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

SINGER FROM THE SEA
by Sheri S. Tepper

[24 jul 2001 – scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

0: Prologue - Dreamtime
In Genevieve's dream, the old woman lunged up the stairs, hands clutching like claws from beneath her
ragtag robe. "Lady. They're coming to kill you, now!"
She dreamed herself responding, too slowly at first, for she was startled and confused
by the old woman's agitation. "Who? Awhero, what are you talking about."
"Your father's taken. The Shah has him. Now his men come for your blood! Yours
and the child's. They're coming."
The smell of blood was all around her, choking her. So much blood. Her husband,
gone, now her father, taken! Dovidi, only a baby, and never outside these walls!
Genevieve dreamed herself crying, "They're coming after Dovidi? How did the Shah
know about the baby?"
"Your father tell him."
Endanger his grandson in that way? Surely not. Oh, surely, surely not. "I'll get him.
We'll go . . ."
"If you take baby, you both be killed." The old woman reached forward and shook
her by the shoulders, so vehement as to forget the prohibitions of caste. "I take him. I
smutch his face and say he one of us. They scared to look and they never doubt . . ."
"Take me, too ..."
"No. You too tall. Too strange looking. They know you!"
"Where? Where shall I go?"
"I sing you Tenopia. Go like Tenopia. By door, your man's cloak with his sunhelmet,
with his needfuls still there, in pockets." She pulled at the rags that hung from her
shoulders, shreds tied together to make a tattered wrapping. "Take this! You tall for
woman, so you walk past like man. Malghaste man. Go now!"
In her dream, she babbled something about getting word to the ship, then she went,
thrust hard by Awhero's arms, strong for a woman her age. She fled to the courtyard, to
the door through the city wall, a door that stood ajar! She could see directly into the
guardpost outside—empty. Never empty except now! It smelled of a trap!
Beside the door hung the outer robe with its sunhelmet hood lining, behind the door
half a dozen staves stood below a pendant cluster of water bottles, like flaccid grapes.
She shut and bolted the inviting door, snatched the cloak, a staff, a waterbottle, and fled
back through the house to the kitchen wing, calling to someone as she went past the
kitchens to the twisting stairs that only the malghaste used. Awhero had shown her the
hatchway below, and she went directly to it, struggling into the robe as she fled, draping
the rags around her shoulders to make it look as if she were clad only in tatters. As she
slipped through the hatchway she heard voices shouting and fists thundering at the door
she had barred.
She came out in a deep stairwell where coiled stairs led up to the narrow alley. The
alley led to the street. She went up, and out, head down, a little bent, the staff softly
thumping as she moved slowly, like any other passerby. Ahead of her was the narrow
malghaste gate through the city wall, never guarded, never even watched, for this was
where the untouchables carried out the city's filth. The stained and tattered rags marked
her as one of them. Outside that gate a small malghaste boy guarded a flock of juvenile
harpya, their fin-wings flattened against the heat, and beyond the flock was a well with a
stone coping. The area around it was sodden, and she felt the mud ooze over her toes as