"Wolfe, Gene - The Urth Of The New Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

Chapter XL -- The Brook Beyond Briah
Chapter XLI -- Severian from His Cenotaph
Chapter XLII -- Ding, Dong, Ding!
Chapter XLIII -- The Evening Tide
Chapter XLIV -- The Morning Tide
Chapter XLV -- The Boat
Chapter XLVI -- The Runaway
Chapter XLVII -- The Sunken City
Chapter XLVIII -- Old Lands and New
Chapter XLIX -- Apu-Punchau
Chapter L -- Darkness in the House of Day
Chapter LI -- The Urth of the New Sun
Appendix -- The Miracle of Apu-Punchau


Chapter I -- The Mainmast


HAVING CAST one manuscript into the seas of time, I
now begin again. Surely it is absurd; but I am not--I will
not be--so absurd myself as to suppose that this will ever
find a reader, even in me. Let me describe then, to no one
and nothing, just who I am and what it is that I have done
to Urth.
My true name is Severian. By my friends, of whom there
were never very many, I was called Severian the Lame. By
my soldiers, of whom I once commanded a great many,
though never enough, Severian the Great. By my foes, who
bred like flies, and like flies were spawned from the corpses
that strewed my battlefields, Severian the Torturer. I was
the last Autarch of our Commonwealth, and as such the
only legitimate ruler of this world when we called it Urth.
But what a disease this writing business is! A few years
ago (if time retains any meaning), I wrote in my cabin on
the ship of Tzadkiel, re-creating from memory the book I
had composed in a clerestory of the House Absolute. Sat
driving my pen like any clerk, recopying a text I could
without difficulty bring to mind, and feeling that I performed
the final meaningful act--or rather, the final meaningless
act--of my life.
So I wrote and slept, and rose to write again, ink flying
across my paper, relived at last the moment at which I
entered poor Valeria's tower and heard it and all the rest
speak to me, felt the proud burden of manhood dropped
upon my shoulders, and knew I was a youth no more. That
was ten years past, I thought. Ten years had gone by when I
wrote of it in the House Absolute. Now the time is perhaps
a century or more. Who can say?
I had brought aboard a narrow coffer of lead with a
close-fitting lid. My manuscript filled it, as I knew it would.