"Gene Wolfe - New Sun 5 - The Urth of the New Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

Chapter XXXVI The Citadel Again
Chapter XXXVII The Book of the New Sun
Chapter XXXVIII To the Tomb of the Monarch
Chapter XXXIX The Claw of the Conciliator Again
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




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 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