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

not know it. She had not before now understood flirting, for example, or the reasons why the men were
always the winners of the processional competitions, or why Handbright so often cried in corners or was
so weary and sharp-tongued. It wasn't that she could not have understood these things, but more that she
was so busy apprehending everything in the world that she had not had time before to make the
connections among them.
She might have been enlightened by overhearing a conversation between two hangers-on of the Old
Shuffle—two of the guards cum hunters known as "the Danderbats" after Theobald Danderbat, forefather
and tribal god, direct line descendent, so it was said, from Thandbar, the forefather of all shifters—who
kept themselves around the keep to watch it, they said, and look after its provisioning. So much time was
actually spent in the provisioning of their drinking and lechery that little enough energy was left for else.
"Every time I flex a little, I feel eyes," Cormier Graywing was saying. "She's everwhere. Anytime I've a
mind to shift my fingers to get a better grip on something, there she is with her eyes on my hands and,
like as not, her hand on mine to feel how the change goes. If there's such a thing as a' everwhere shifter
child, it's this she-child, Mavin." Cormier was a virile, salacious old man thing, father of a half-dozen
non-shifter whelps and three true-bred members of the clan. He ran a boneless ripple now, down from
shoulders through fingers, a single tentacle wriggle before coming back to bone shape in order to explain
how he felt. Some of the Danderbats would carry on whole conversations in muscle talk without ever
opening their mouths. "Still, there's never a sign she knows she's female and I'm male, her not noticing
she gives me a bit of tickle."
"Tisn't child flirtiness." The other speaker was Haribald Halfmad, so named in his years in Schlaizy
Noithn and never, to his own satisfaction, renamed. "There's no sexy mockery there. Just that wide-eyed
kind of oh-my look what you'd get from a baby with its first noisy toy. She hasn't changed that look since
she was a nursling, and that's what's discomfiting about her. When she was a toddler, there was some
wonder if she was all there in the brain net, and she was taken out to a Healer when she was six or so,
just to see."
"I didn't know that! Well then, it must have been taken serious; we Old Shuffle Xhindi don't seek Healers
for naught."
"We Danderbats don't seek Healers at all, Graywing, as you well know, old ox. It was her sister
Handbright took her, for they're both Ogbones, daughter of Abrara Ogbone—she that has a brother up
Battlefox way. But that was soon after the childer's mother died, so it was forgiven as a kind of upset,
though normally the Elders would have had Handbright in a basket for it. Handbright brought her back
saying the Healer found nothing wrong with the child save sadness, which would go away of itself with
time. Since then the thought's been that she's a mite slow but otherwise tribal as the rest of us. I wish
she'd get on with it, for I've a mind to try her soon as her Talent's set." And he licked his lips, nudging his
fellow with a lubricious elbow. "If she doesn't get on with it, I may hurry things a bit."
The object of this conversation was sitting at the foot of a slything column in the p'natti, in full sight of
the two old man things but as unconscious of them as though she had been on another world. Mavin had
just discovered that she could change the length of her toes.
The feeling was rather but not entirely like pain. There was a kind of itchy delight in it as well, not unlike
the delight which could be evoked by stroking and manipulating certain body parts, but without that
restless urgency. There was something in it, as well, of the fear of falling, a kind of breathless gap at the
center of things as though a misstep might bring sudden misfortune. Despite all this, Mavin went on with
what she was doing, which was to grow her toes a hand's-width longer and then make them shorter again,

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 THE SONG OF MAVIN MANYSHAPED - Sheri S. Tepper

all hidden in the shadow of her skirts. She had a horrible suspicion that this bending and extending of
them might make them fall off, and in her head she could see them wriggling away like so many worms,
blind and headless, burrowing themselves down into the ground at the bottom of the column, to be found