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

I saw him. He layed sprawled, with one leg crumpled under him and
the other extended. A falchion had fallen near his right hand, its
leather lanyard still about his wrist. His simple barbute had dropped
from his head and rolled a step away. The fly crawled up his boot
until it reached the bare flesh just below the knee, then flew again,
with the noise of a tiny saw.
I knew, of course, that he was dead, and even as I felt relief my
sense of isolation came rushing back, though I had not realized that
it had departed. Taking him by the shoulder, I turned him over. His
body had not yet swelled, but the smell of death had come, however
faint. His face had softened like a mask of wax set before a fire;
there was no telling now with what expression he had died. He had
been young and blond--one of those handsome, square faces. I
looked for a wound but found none.
The straps of his pack had been drawn so tight that I could neither
pull it off nor even loosen the fastenings. In the end I took the coutel
from his belt and cut them, then drove the point into a tree. A
blanket, a scrap of paper, a fire-blackened pan with a socket handle,

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two pairs of rough stockings (very welcome), and, best of all, an
onion and a half loaf of dark bread wrapped in a clean rag, and five
strips of dried meat and a lump of cheese wrapped in another.
I ate the bread and cheese first, forcing myself, when I found I could
not eat slowly, to rise after every third bite and walk up and down.
The bread helped by requiring a great deal of chewing; it tasted
precisely like the hard bread We used to feed our clients in the
Matachin Tower, bread I had stolen, more from mischief than from
hunger, once or twice. The cheese was dry and smelly and salty, but
excellent all the same; I thought that I had never tasted such cheese
before, and I know I have never tasted any since. I might have been
eating life. It made me thirsty, and I learned how well an onion
quenches thirst by stimulating the salivary glands.
By the time I reached the meat, which was heavily salted too, I was
satiated enough to begin debating whether I should reserve it
against the night, and I decided to eat one piece and save the other
four.
The air had been still since early that morning, but now a faint
breeze blew, cooling my cheeks, stirring the leaves, and catching
the paper I had pulled from the dead soldier's pack and sending it
rattling across the moss to lodge against a tree. Still chewing and
swallowing, I pursued it and picked it up. It was a letter--I assume
one he had not had the opportunity to send, or perhaps to complete.
His hand had been angular, and smaller than I would have
anticipated, though it may be that its smallness only resulted from
his wish to crowd many words onto the small sheet, which appeared
to have been the last he possessed.