"Gene Wolfe - New Sun 1- The Shadow of the Torturer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

that came to line Gyoll, held potter's fields. As a boy I seldom went so far
alone, or half so far.

There were always the three of us - Drotte, Roche, and I. Later Eata, the next
oldest among the apprentices. None of us were born among the torturers, for none
are. It is said that in ancient times there were both men and women in the
guild, and that sons and daughters were born to them and brought up in the
mystery, as is now the ease among the lamp-makers and the goldsmiths and many
other guilds. But Ymar the Almost Just, observing how cruel the women were and
how often they exceeded the punishments he had decreed, ordered that there
should be women among the torturers no more.
Since that time our numbers have been repaired solely from the children of those
who fall into our hands. In our Matachin Tower, a certain bar of iron thrusts
from a bulkhead at the height of a man's groin. Male children small enough to
stand upright beneath it are nurtured as our own; and when a woman big with
child is sent to us we open her and if the babe draws breath engage a wet-nurse
if it be a boy. The females are rendered to the witches. So it has been since
the days of Ymar, and those days are now by many hundreds of years forgotten.
Thus none of us knows our descent. Each would be an exultant if he could, and it
is a fact that many persons of high lineage are given over to us. As boys each
of us formed his own conjectures, and each attempted to question the older
brothers among the journeymen, though they were locked in their own bitternesses
and told us little. Eata, believing himself descended of that family, drew the
arms of one of the great northern clans on the ceiling above his cot in the year
of which I speak.
For my part, I had already adopted as my own the device graved in bronze above
the door of a certain mausoleum. They were a fountain rising above waters, and a
ship volant, and below these a rose. The door itself had been sprung long ago;
two empty coffins lay on the floor. Three more, too heavy for me to shift and
still intact, waited on the shelves along one wall. Neither the closed coffins
nor the open ones constituted the attraction of the place, though I sometimes
rested on what remained of the soft, faded padding of the latter. Rather, it was
the smallness of the room, the thick walls of masonry, and the single, narrow
window with its one bar, together with the faithless door (so massively heavy)
that remained eternally ajar.
Through window and door I could look out unseen on all the bright life of tree
and shrub and grass outside. The linnets and rabbits that fled when I approached
could neither hear nor scent me there. I watched the storm crow build her nest
and rear her young two cubits from my face. I saw the fox trot by with upraised
brush; and once that giant fox, taller than all but the tallest hounds, that men
call the maned wolf, loped by at dusk on some unguessable errand from the ruined
quarters of the south. The caracara coursed vipers for me, and the hawk lifted
his wings to the wind from the top of a pine.
A moment suffices to describe these things, for which I watched so long. The
decades of a saros would not be long enough for me to write all they meant to
the ragged apprentice boy I was. Two thoughts (that were nearly dreams) obsessed
me and made them infinitely precious. The first was that at some not-distant
time, time itself would stop . . . the colored days that had so long been drawn
forth like a chain of conjuror's scarves come to an end, the sullen sun wink out
at last. The second was that there existed somewhere a miraculous light-which I