"Gene Wolfe - New Sun 4 - The Citadel of the Autarch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

Wolfe,_Gene_-_Book_of_the_New_Sun_4_-_The_Citadel_of_the_Autarch




The Citadel of the
Autarch
Volume Three of The Book of the New
Sun

GENE WOLFE
At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun. And
the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
--Rudyard Kipling


I
The Dead Soldier
I had never seen war, or even talked of it at length with someone
who had, but I was young and knew something of violence, and so
believed that war would be no more than a new experience for me,
as other things--the possession of authority in Thrax, say, or my
escape from the House Absolute--had been new experiences.

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Gene%20Wolfe%20-%20...20Sun%2004]%20-%20The%20Citadel%20of%20the%20.html (1 of 342)15-2-2006 23:22:13
Wolfe,_Gene_-_Book_of_the_New_Sun_4_-_The_Citadel_of_the_Autarch


War is not a new experience; it is a new world. Its inhabitants are
more different from human beings than Famulimus and her friends.
Its laws are new, and even its geography is new, because it is a
geography in which insignificant hills and hollows are lifted to the
importance of cities. Just as our familiar Urth holds such
monstrosities as Erebus, Abaia, and Arioch, so the world of war is
stalked by the monsters called battles, whose cells are individuals
but who have a life and intelligence of their own, and whom one
approaches through an ever-thickening array of portents.
One night I woke long before dawn. Everything seemed still, and I
was afraid some enemy had come near, so that my mind had stirred
at his malignancy. I rose and looked about. The hills were lost in the
darkness. I was in a nest of long grass, a nest I had trampled flat for
myself. Crickets sang.
Something caught my eye far to the north: a flash, I thought, of
violet just on the horizon. I stared at the point from which it seemed
to have come. Just as I had convinced myself that what I believed I
had seen was no more than a fault of vision, perhaps some lingering
effect of the drug I had been given in the hetman's house, there was
a flare of magenta a trifle to the left of the point I had been staring