Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 57

‘Explain yourselves, novices.’ The nun fixed them with dark and beady eyes.

‘We were …’ Clera searched for an explanation … and could find nothing better than the truth, which she settled on with a sigh of defeat. ‘Nona was very hungry!’

A scatter of laughter went up at that, cut off sharply as Sister Rule’s yardstick cracked across a desktop. She reached the table, looming over both girls. ‘Well, Nona does appear to need some feeding up. Do not be late to my class again, Nona. Today you missed a quick observation of the layered structure of this plateau where the Glasswater sinkhole exposes it. Next time you could miss considerably more than that – dinner included.’

Clera slipped away to her desk near the door. Nona stayed by the table. She looked up at Sister Rule’s face, which was at once both fleshy and severe, then let her eyes slip to the globe again.

‘You can take either of those two desks at the back, Nona.’ Mistress Academia laid her yardstick against her table and let out a sigh. ‘I do hope you’re not going to slow us down too much, child. The abbess casts her nets very wide sometimes …’

Nona dropped her gaze to the floor and took a step in the direction the nun had waved at. A mixture of anger and defiance boiled behind her eyes but stronger than that, more than that, was the desire to know. Besides, she was too full to be properly angry.

‘I … don’t know what geography is.’

Sister Rule’s yardstick killed the laughter before it started. ‘Good. You’re clever enough to ask questions. That’s better than many I’ve had through these doors.’ She took her seat behind the desk, straightened her habit, then looked up. ‘Geography is like history. History is the story of mankind since we first started to record it. The story and the understanding of that story. Geography is the history of the world beneath our feet. The mountains and the ice, rivers, oceans, land, all of it recorded in the very rocks themselves for those with the wit to read what’s set there. Consider this slab of rock our convent rests upon, for example. The history of this plateau is written in the limestone layers that can be seen in the sinkhole two hundred yards west of this tower.’ She sent Nona on towards her desk with a gentle poke of her stick. ‘Our history is wide and we are narrow, so perhaps its lessons no longer fit. Cut your cloth to your measure, some say. But the history of the land has lessons more important than those of kings and dynasties. The history of the ice is written there. The tale of our dying sun, etched into rock and glacier. These are the lessons we all live by. And when the moon fails we will die by them too.’