Soldier of Sidon

Soldier of Sidon is the third of Gene Wolfe's novels about Latro, after Soldier of the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989). Latro is a mercenary from Italy. Fighting for the Persian king Xerxes, he took a head wound at the Battle of Plataea, and since then he cannot remember anything from one day to the next. He writes down each day on a scroll so that he can read in the morning who he is and who his friends are. The wound has left him one compensation: he sees gods and spirits as plainly as he sees people.

In this book Latro comes to Egypt with his friend Muslak, a Phoenician sea captain, looking for a cure. Egypt's Persian satrap hires Muslak to explore the upper reaches of the Nile, and Latro goes with the expedition, leading its soldiers. It includes an official named Qanju, a scribe named Thotmaktef, a magician named Sahuset, and temple women hired as river wives, among them a singing girl from the temple of Hathor at Sais who becomes Latro's companion. Early on Osiris weighs Latro's heart, finds that he still lives, and sends him back among the living. Upriver the gods change from Egyptian to African, and along the way Latro meets a talking baboon and a huge black cat, a magician's wax statue that comes to life and demands blood, and a cobra named Uraeus whom he takes on as a slave. Latro is also asked to look for Kames, a merchant's missing son. The book ends with Latro's story still unresolved, and the scroll itself, the book tells us, was found in a jar at the bottom of Lake Nasser.

Wolfe gives readers only what Latro knows, which is not much, so you piece things together as he does. It is the most straightforward of the three, and new readers can start here, but it is still slow and elusive. Publishers Weekly called it "a leisurely, dreamlike, haunted house of a novel." It suits readers of Mary Renault and anyone who likes an unreliable narrator.