"Liz Williams - Empire of Bones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)

Slipping the too-large ring onto her finger, he gestured to Jaya, and obediently she knelt before him on
the dusty earth.

"Your tongue, child."

A stillness fell over the crowd, as though time had stopped. Jaya slipped the goat's tongue from her
cheek so that it pro-truded between her lips. At first the trick had revolted her, but now she was used to
it. Deftly, brandishing the knife, her fa-ther pretended to sever the tongue. Jaya made a convincing grunt
of anguish and the crowd flinched. Jaya rolled her eyes in mute horror.

"Now. Lie down." Jaya's father covered her with a grimy cloth, blew into the fire so that the smoke
swirled upward, and swept the blade of the long knife across her throat. She saw the blade come up, red
and dripping. The crowd gave a great gasp, but Jaya lay still. Once, the smoke had made her eyes water;
she had long since learned to keep them closed. She held her breath. The thick goat's blood seeped in a
pool be-neath her neck; she could feel the punctured bladder nestling softly against her ear. Her father
was speaking, covering her deftly with the cloth, and she knew that he was drawing the attention of the
crowd, the conjuror's sleight of hand and slip of voice that makes everyone believe that nothing has
hap-pened at all. A few seconds: enough for Jaya to worm her hand up to her throat and wipe away all
trace of the blood from her neck. The cloth was snatched away; she sprang up, smiling.

"I'm alive!" she cried. The crowd, pleased to be so de-ceived, burst into applause.

After the show, Jaya's father sat and smiled beatifically, staring into the hot pale sky as if his gaze were
fixed on Heaven. He did not ask for money, but soon the bag that Jaya held was full of notes. Jaya
closed the bag, and her father took her by the wrist and hauled her up from the ground. The vil-lagers
were reluctandy dispersing.

"Well?" Jaya's father said sharply, into her ear. "That showed them, eh?" There was always this same
sour triumph after a successful performance. "Your dad might be just a poor untouchable, but he can still
fool his betters, isn't that so?" His face twisted, and Jaya held her breath, waiting for the familiar litany.
"Untouchable, indeed! I had a good job, once—I worked in a laboratory. I was paid decent wages, and
then they brought in this caste restoration program—The old ways are the best ways, they said. The
country needs stability, they said. We all have to knuckle down. Who has to? Us, that's who, the
lowest of all, nothing but cheap labor and now even less than that…"

It was a familiar complaint, and the slightest thing would set it off. Jaya just nodded dutifully and followed
her father as he limped through the village, his head held high with a pride he could barely afford.

Later, beneath the shadows of die neem trees which lay be-yond the village, her father said, "Show me
again." He watched closely as Jaya held her small hands out before her, ghostly in the light of the fire. A
coin tumbled from her fin-gers.

"Again."

She palmed the coin, twisting her hands over and over again to show that there was nothing concealed,
the coin rest-ing between the backs of her fingers.

"No, that's no good. I can see the edge."

Jaya looked up and said with guilty defiance, "I can't do it. My hands are too small."