The Poppy War. R.F. Kuang

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СКАЧАТЬ I guess I could kill him. Smother him in his sleep, you know? Would I inherit his fortune? That would be fine, wouldn’t it?” She began to laugh hysterically. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “It’s easier than doping him up. No one would ever know.”

      Tutor Feyrik rose quickly and pulled out a stool. “Sit down, child.”

      Rin trembled. “I can’t. I still have to get through Fuzi’s Analects before tomorrow.”

      “Runin. Sit.”

      She sank onto the stool.

      Tutor Feyrik sat down opposite her and took her hands in his. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “Once, not too long ago, there lived a scholar from a very poor family. He was too weak to work long hours in the fields, and his only chance of providing for his parents in their old age was to win a government position so that he might receive a robust stipend. To do this, he had to matriculate at an academy. With the last of his earnings, the scholar bought a set of textbooks and registered for the Keju. He was very tired, because he toiled in the fields all day and could only study at night.”

      Rin’s eyes fluttered shut. Her shoulders heaved, and she suppressed a yawn.

      Tutor Feyrik snapped his fingers in front of her eyes. “The scholar had to find a way to stay awake. So he pinned the end of his braid to the ceiling, so that every time he drooped forward, his hair would yank at his scalp and the pain would awaken him.” Tutor Feyrik smiled sympathetically. “You’re almost there, Rin. Just a little further. Please do not commit spousal homicide.”

      But she had stopped listening.

      “The pain made him focus,” she said.

      “That’s not really what I was trying to—”

      “The pain made him focus,” she repeated.

      Pain could make her focus.

      So Rin kept a candle by her books, dripping hot wax on her arm if she nodded off. Her eyes would water in pain, she would wipe her tears away, and she would resume her studies.

      The day she took the exam, her arms were covered with burn scars.

      Afterward, Tutor Feyrik asked her how the test went. She couldn’t tell him. Days later, she couldn’t remember those horrible, draining hours. They were a gap in her memory. When she tried to recall how she’d answered a particular question, her brain seized up and did not let her relive it.

      She didn’t want to relive it. She never wanted to think about it again.

      Seven days until the scores were out. Every booklet in the province had to be checked, double-checked, and triple-checked.

      For Rin, those days were unbearable. She hardly slept. For the past two years she had filled her days with frantic studying. Now she had nothing to do—her future was out of her hands, and knowing that made her feel far worse.

      She drove everyone else mad with her fretting. She made mistakes at the shop. She created a mess out of inventory. She snapped at Kesegi and fought with the Fangs more than she should have.

      More than once she considered stealing another pack of opium and smoking it. She had heard of women in the village committing suicide by swallowing opium nuggets whole. In the dark hours of the night, she considered that, too.

      Everything hung in suspended animation. She felt as if she were drifting, her whole existence reduced to a single score.

      She thought about making contingency plans, preparations to escape the village in case she hadn’t tested out after all. But her mind refused to linger on the subject. She could not possibly conceive of life after the Keju because there might not be a life after the Keju.

      Rin grew so desperate that for the first time in her life, she prayed.

      The Fangs were far from religious. They visited the village temple sporadically at best, mostly to exchange packets of opium behind the golden altar.

      They were hardly alone in their lack of religious devotion. Once the monastic orders had exerted even greater influence on the country than the Warlords did now, but then the Red Emperor had come crashing through the continent with his glorious quest for unification, leaving slaughtered monks and empty temples in his wake.

      The monastic orders were gone now, but the gods remained: numerous deities that represented every category from sweeping themes of love and warfare to the mundane concerns of kitchens and households. Somewhere, those traditions were kept alive by devout worshippers who had gone into hiding, but most villagers in Tikany frequented the temples only out of ritualistic habit. No one truly believed—at least, no one who dared admit it. To the Nikara, gods were only relics of the past: subjects of myths and legends, but no more.

      But Rin wasn’t taking any chances. She stole out of the shop early one afternoon and brought an offering of dumplings and stuffed lotus root to the plinths of the Four Gods.

      The temple was very quiet. At midday, she was the only one inside. Four statues gazed mutely at her through their painted eyes. Rin hesitated before them. She was not entirely certain which one she ought to pray to.

      She knew their names, of course—the White Tiger, the Black Tortoise, the Azure Dragon, and the Vermilion Bird. And she knew that they represented the four cardinal directions, but they formed only a small subset of the vast pantheon of deities that were worshipped in Nikan. This temple also bore shrines to smaller guardian gods, whose likenesses hung on scrolls draped over the walls.

      So many gods. Which was the god of test scores? Which was the god of unmarried shopgirls who wished to stay that way?

      She decided to simply pray to all of them.

      “If you exist, if you’re up there, help me. Give me a way out of this shithole. Or if you can’t do that, give the import inspector a heart attack.”

      She looked around the empty temple. What came next? She had always imagined that praying involved more than just speaking out loud. She spied several unused incense sticks lying by the altar. She lit the end of one of them by dipping it in the brazier, and then waved it experimentally in the air.

      Was she supposed to hold the smoke to the gods? Or should she smoke the stick herself? She had just held the burned end to her nose when a temple custodian strode out from behind the altar.

      They blinked at each other.

      Slowly Rin removed the incense stick from her nostril.

      “Hello,” she said. “I’m praying.”

      “Please leave,” he said.

      Exam results were to be posted at noon outside the examination hall.

      Rin closed up shop early and went downtown with Tutor Feyrik half an hour in advance. A large crowd had already gathered around the post, so they found a shady corner a hundred meters away and waited.

      So many people had accumulated by the hall that Rin couldn’t see when the scrolls were posted, but she knew because suddenly everyone was shouting, and the crowd was rushing forward, pressing Rin and Tutor Feyrik tightly into the fold.

      Her heart beat so fast she could hardly breathe. СКАЧАТЬ