Read Online Sword & Citadel by Gene Wolfe - Free Book Online

begin, the autarch of that time, who had never dreamed before the wild dreams of sleep but only waking dreams of dominion, dreamed at last. And in his dream he saw all the untamed worlds of life and death, stone and river, beast and tree slipping away from his hands forever.
    â€œWhen morning came, he ordered that the torches not be kindled, but that there should be a great vault built to house all the volumes and scrolls the white-robed men had gathered. For he thought that if the new empire he
planned should fail him at last, he would retire to that vault and enter the worlds that, in imitation of the ancients, he was determined to cast aside.
    â€œHis empire did fail him, as it had to. The past cannot be found in the future where it is not—not until the metaphysical world, which is so much larger and so much slower than the physical world, completes its revolution and the New Sun comes. But he did not retire as he had planned into that vault and the curtain wall he had caused to be built about it, for when once the wild things have been put behind a man for good and all, they are trapwise and cannot be recaptured.
    â€œNevertheless, it is said that before all he gathered was sealed away, he set a guardian over it. And when that guardian’s time on Urth was done, he found another, and he another, so that they continue ever faithful to the commands of that autarch, for they are saturated in the wild thoughts sprung from the lore saved by the machines, and such faith is one of those wild things.”
    I had been disrobing her as she spoke, and kissing her breasts; but I said, “Did all those thoughts of which you spoke go out of the world when the autarch locked them away? Haven’t I ever heard of them?”
    â€œNo, because they had been passed from hand to hand for a long time, and had entered into the blood of all the peoples. Besides, it is said that the guardian sometimes sends them out, and though they always return to him at last, they are read, whether by one or many, before they sink once more into his dark.”
    â€œIt is a wonderful story,” I said. “I think that perhaps I know more of it than you, but I had never heard it before.” I found that her legs were long, and smoothly tapered from thighs like cushions of silk to slender ankles; all her body, indeed, was shaped for delight.
    Her fingers touched the clasp that held my cloak about my shoulders. “Need you take this off?” she asked. “Can’t it cover us?”
    â€œIt can,” I said.

VII
    Attractions
    Almost I drowned in the delight she gave me, for though I did not love her as I had once loved Thecla, nor as I loved Dorcas even then, and she was not beautiful as Jolenta had once been beautiful, I felt a tenderness for her that was no more than in part born of the unquiet wine, and she was such a woman as I had dreamed of as a ragged boy in the Matachin Tower, before I had ever beheld Thea’s heart-shaped face by the side of the opened grave; and she knew far more of the arts of love than any of the three.
    When we rose we went to a flowing basin of silver to wash. There were two women there who had been lovers as we had been, and they stared at us and laughed; but when they saw I would not spare them because they were women, they fled shrieking.
    Then we cleansed each other. I know Cyriaca believed that I would leave her then, as I believed that she would leave me; but we did not separate (though it would, perhaps, have been better if we had), but went out into the silent little garden, which was full of night, and stood beside a lonely fountain.
    She held my hand, and I held hers as children do. “Have you ever visited the House Absolute?” she asked. She was watching our reflections in the moon-drenched water, and her voice was so low I could scarcely hear her.
    I told her that I had, and at the words her hand tightened on mine.
    â€œDid you visit the Well of Orchids