"Sheri S. Tepper - The Song of Mavin Manyshaped" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

THE SONG OF MAVIN MANYSHAPED - Sheri S. Tepper

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THE SONG OF MAVIN MANYSHAPED
Sheri S. Tepper

Around the inner maze of Danderbat keep—with its hidden places for the elders, its sleeping chambers,
kitchens and nurseries—lay the vaster labyrinth of the outer p'natti: slything walls interrupted by square-
form doors, an endless array of narrowing pillars, climbing ups and slithering downs, launch platforms so
low as to require only leaping legs and others so high that wings would be the only guarantee of no
injury.
Through the p'natti the shifters of all the Xhindi clans came each year at Assembly time, processions of
them, stiff selves marching into the outer avenues only to melt into liquid serpentines which poured
through the holes in the slything walls; into tall wands of flesh sliding through the narrowing doors; into
pneumatic billows bounding over the platforms and up onto the heights; all in a flurry of wings, feathers,
hides, scales, conceits and frenzies which dazzled the eyes and the senses so that the children became
hysterical with it and hopped about on the citadel roof as though an act of will could force them all at
once and beforetime into that Talent they wanted more than any other. Every year the family Danderbat
changed the p'natti; new shaped obstacles were invented; new requirements placed upon the shifting flesh
which would pass through it to the inner maze, and every year at Assembly the shifters came, foaming at
the outer reaches like surf, then plunging through the reefs and cliffs of the p'natti to the shore of the
keep, the central place where there were none who were not shifters—save those younglings who were
not sure yet what it was they were.
Among these was Mavin, a daughter of the shape-wise Xhindi, form-family of Danderbat the Old
Shuffle, a girl of some twelve or fourteen years. She was a forty-season child, and expected to show
something pretty soon, for shifters came to it young and she was already older than some. There were
those who had begun to doubt she would ever come through the p'natti along the she-road reserved for
females not yet at or through their child-bearing time. Progeny of the shifters who turned out not to have
the Talent were sent away to be fostered elsewhere as soon as that lack was known, and the possibility of
such a journey was beginning to be rumored for Mavin.
She had grown up as shifter children do when raised in a shifter place, full of wild images and fluttering
dreams of the things she would become when her Talent flowered. As it happened, Mavin was the only
girl child behind the p'natti during that decade, for Handbright Ogbone, her sister, was a full decade older
and in possession of her Talent before Mavin was seven. There were boys aplenty and overmuch, some
saying with voices of dire prophecy that it was a plague of males they had, but the Ogbone daughters
were the only females born to be reared behind the Danderbat p'natti since Throsset of Dowes, and
Throsset had fled the keep as long as four years before. Since there were no other girls, the dreams which
Mavin shared were boyish dreams. Handbright no longer dreamed, or if she did, she did not speak of it.
Mavin's own mother, Abrara Ogbone, had died bearing the boy child, Mertyn—caught by the shift-devil,
some said, because she had experimented with forbidden shapes while she was pregnant. No one was so
heartless as to say this to Mavin directly, but she had overheard it without in the least understanding it
several times during her early years. Now at an age where her own physical maturity was imminent, she
understood better what they had been speaking of, but she had not yet made the jump of intuition which
applied this knowledge to herself. She had a kind of stubborn naivete about her which resisted learning

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 THE SONG OF MAVIN MANYSHAPED - Sheri S. Tepper

some of the things which other girls got with their mother's milk. It was an Ogbone trait, though she did