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

"It doesn't matter whether your hands are small or not. These tricks are best learnt while you're young;
I've told you a thousand times. If you were a boy—" He broke off. His hand cuffed the side of her head,
not lightly. "Watch what I do." The coin glittered in the firelight as his skillful hand turned. "Now, again."

SHE thought she would never learn, Jaya remembered now. Once, these tricks would have been the
province of the con-juror's son alone, but Jaya had no brothers. Her mother had died, leaving only a
cheap garnet ring and the memory of san-dalwood, faint and fragrant as the smoke from the funeral
pyres. Her mother, so her father said, had not liked tricks and conjuring, for all that she'd married a
gilli-gilli man. But within a year or two, Jaya had picked up all the tricks that had made her father's name
as a magician, a man to whom gods listened.

Memory unscrolled like a film: now, from the prison of the hospital bed, Jaya watched herself traveling
the dusty roads of Uttar Pradesh. She saw her father sitting back on his heels in the dirt as his magical
child conjured ash and money and medals and rings to fool the villagers of rural Bharat. She saw the avid
gaze of the crowds as she was killed and resurrected, over and over again. She saw the seeds of her life
beginning to green and grow.

The summers wore on and the rains still came, but each year was drier than the last. By the time she was
ten, Jaya had made a name for herself in the district. People seemed to trust her, though she didn't
understand why that should be. Even then Jaya knew that her life was a lie. Tricks and conjuring and
illusion—it was like eating air. Every time she performed a faked miracle in a god's name, she expected
Heaven to strike her down. But it never happened, and at last she came to won-der whether the gods
were even there.

Yet she was always troubled by the sense that there was something more, something beyond the lies and
the tricks. In the stillness of the long, burning nights, she lay awake, listen-ing, and it sometimes seemed to
her that she could hear a voice, speaking soft and distant beyond the edges of the world. It was faint and
blurred with static, like a radio tuned to the wrong station, but she did not think it was a dream—though
maybe, she would muse, it was just that she wanted too much to believe. The voice fell silent, for months
at a time, and Jaya would give up hope all over again, but then she'd hear it once more. It was the only
secret she had.

Lying restlessly in the hospital bed, she blinked, conjuring the memories back. She was thirteen years old.
The monsoon season was beginning, and Jaya ran out into the welcome rain, spinning in the dust until the
fat drops churned it into mud. She spun until she was dizzy and her sari was soaked, then she bolted for
the shelter of the trees. She crouched in the long grass, reveling in the feeling of being unseen. Then she
real-ized that something was watching her after all. There was a locust climbing a stem of grass. The
grass bent beneath the lo-cust's stout green body, and Jaya held her breath, waiting for it to reach the tip
of the stem and leap away. And as she stopped breathing, so time stopped, too. The day seemed to slow
and slide. Darkness engulfed Jaya's sight, and then there was a brightness at the edge of the world, like
the sun rising. The lo-cust turned to her, gazing through golden eyes, and said with-out words, I have
been waiting for you.

Jaya felt her mouth fall foolishly open. The locust said im-patiently, When the Tekhein designate
speaks, you hear, do you not?

"I don't understand," Jaya whispered, and the locust gath-ered itself up and sprang away out of sight. She
sat in the grass for a long time, listening. She could hear something hum-ming, just at the edge of sound,
and she couldn't get it out of her head. Slowly, she rose and made her way back to the hut.