Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 56

‘The world?’ That made no sense at all.

‘Abeth.’ Clera huffed her breath out as if Nona’s stupidity had hit her in the stomach. ‘A model of it.’

Nona blinked. Her world had been the village, the forests, the fields, and in the distance the northern ice forming one wall of the Corridor. She hadn’t ever considered that it might have a shape and if she had she would not have guessed at a ball, white or otherwise.

‘It’s a globe.’ Clera reached out to stop it spinning. ‘We live … here.’ She put her finger on the line around the middle.

‘We do?’ Nona leaned in to look more closely.

‘Want to see something special?’ Clera grinned. Without waiting for an answer she set one hand to the top of the globe and the other to the bottom then, with a little effort, rotated each in opposite directions. Smoothly and without noise the lower part of the white surface began to retreat. Nona saw that it was not one piece as she had imagined but comprised many bladed parts that shuffled beneath each other like the feathers of a folding wing. In consequence the cord-thin strip of colour girdling the globe widened, first to a finger’s width, then wider and wider still until Nona’s whole hand couldn’t cover it. The pattern of jewel-enamelled blues and greens and browns fascinated her eye.

‘What—’

‘That’s the world fifty thousand years ago, long before the tribes even came.’ Clera rotated the halves back slowly and the ice advanced. ‘All the people that lived across all these lands, pushed back.’ She returned the ice sheets to their original position. ‘Pushed into this tiny corridor as the sun got old and weak.’

‘How could they fit?’ Nona imagined them running before the ice.

Clera shrugged. ‘Mistress Blade says people need room. You can squash them in only so far, then the bleeding starts, and when it’s done … there’s just about enough room again.’

‘It’s good to see that some of your lessons stick, Novice Clera.’

Both girls turned to see the doorway behind them now almost entirely full of Sister Rule, the convent’s Mistress Academia, a woman of considerable height and still more considerable girth, all wrapped in the dark grey of a nun’s habit. Sister Rule pushed on into the classroom, the rest of Red Class filing in behind her, diverging towards their allotted desks. Arabella already had three girls pressed around her and they took seats beside each other, all of them smirking behind their hands.