Soldier of Sidon

Latro, the mercenary whose head wound has left him unable to keep a memory past a single day, is now in Egypt, and as before he writes everything down on a scroll each evening so that the man who wakes tomorrow will know something. He can still see gods, which nobody else can, and they still take an interest in him. Hired by a satrap and attached to an expedition sailing up the Nile beyond the cataracts in search of gold and the source of the river, Latro travels with a talking cat, a ship's captain, a wax woman brought to life, and Myt-ser'eu, a singing girl who loves him and must reintroduce herself each morning. The gods of Egypt are stranger and older than the Greek ones he encountered before, and their bargains are less legible. Wolfe's method has always required a reader willing to assemble what the narrator cannot, and here it produces something quietly devastating: a man who is unfailingly decent, who forms attachments daily and loses them nightly, and who keeps writing anyway. Coming twenty years after the first two books, it is both a continuation and an elegy.