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‘The Sanguinary Field’
Impressions of Chapter 27 of Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer
© 2019 James LaFond
MAY/30/19
Reading from pages 164-168 of Shadow & Claw
Is He Dead?
Fittingly, as a ruler should, before recounting his duel the Autarch discusses the social implications of the practice, deciding that it is a good, as the duelist is likely to show courage in service to the state and acquire a good mate and have children. He goes on to point out that though good men die in duels, such men are murdered in the absence of dueling traditions and that cultivates murderers instead of duelists, men with the lowest character.
“The vanishing sun, whose disc was now a quarter concealed by the impenetrable blackness of the wall, had dyed the sky…colors falling upon the throng of monomachists and loungers much as we see the aureate beams of divine favor fall on hierarchs in art, lent them an appearance insubstantial and thaumaturgic, as though they had all been produced a moment before by the flourish of a cloth and would vanish into the air again at a whistle.”
The chaos of the duel is masterfully addressed from the muddled perspective of the witless hero sucked into a very specific dance of death, highly favorable to the specialist and lethal to the novice. Surviving by some agency he fails to understand, the hero wanders from the field of malice and betrayal he had been lured to holding the hand of the only innocent person he has ever known.
Diction of note
-graisle
Menthol Rampage
‘To the Renascent Stars’
before the rising sun
‘If Poison Had a Face’
eBook
fanatic
eBook
under the god of things
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the lesser angels of our nature
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thriving in bad places
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barbarism versus civilization
eBook
sons of aryas
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hate
eBook
into leviathan’s maw
eBook
son of a lesser god
eBook
predation
eBook
cracker-boy
eBook
the year the world took the z-pill
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taboo you
eBook
solo boxing
eBook
songs of aryas
eBook
let the world fend for itself
eBook
the sunset saga complete
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uncle satan
eBook
winter of a fighting life
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within leviathan’s craw
eBook
the greatest boxer
eBook
blue eyed daughter of zeus
eBook
masculine axis
eBook
song of the secret gardener
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honor among men
eBook
logic of steel
eBook
book of nightmares
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the greatest lie ever sold
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fate
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ranger?
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advent america
eBook
wife—
eBook
the fighting edge
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the combat space
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beasts of aryas
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fiction anthology one
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the gods of boxing
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z-pill forever
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all-power-fighting
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on the overton railroad
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dark, distant futures
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logic of force
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orphan nation
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the first boxers
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sorcerer!
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when you're food
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night city
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broken dance
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on combat
eBook
by the wine dark sea
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menthol rampage
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your trojan whorse
eBook
triumph
eBook
time & cosmos
eBook
america the brutal
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