In Green's Jungles

Hide looked uncomfortable. "It was after we got back."



"I see. She felt obliged to make her restored nature clear to you"



He could not meet my eyes. "Yeah."



"A grave disappointment."



He did not reply, and when he had finished his meal he stood up and began to build this little shelter.



* * *



There is a marsh here. Hide says he knew of it, but had hoped the ice would be thick enough for us to cross. It is not, and we will have to go around. Quite large, he says. A great man-killer stalks there two-legged like a man, green and quiet, with fangs longer and thicker than a strong man's arm  -  but only for me, and only when I do not look for it.



Tonight we talked about the Neighbors. I told him about the ruins on the island, and how I had fallen into the pit there, saying, "No wall was higher than my waist."



"You said there're towers on Green that go up and up, higher than the lander."



I nodded. "There are."



"When we were talking about the trees growing out of the walls, you said the Vanished People built better than we do."



"Better than we do thus far, at least."



"Then the place on that island must have been empty, a long long time."



I tried to read his eyes, as he was trying to read mine-tried to learn how much he knew and guess how much he guessed.



"What happened to them?"



I stared out over the marsh. It cannot have been for more than a few seconds, but the whole Red Sun Whorl seemed to rise before me: the starving, vicious omophagist; the cemetery gate through which wisps of fog wandered like lost spirits; the stupid, hard-faced guard before it who had represented our only hope of medical treatment for Rigoglio, and justice.



Surely we did not all speak at once, although it must have seemed so. Rigoglio himself was almost too weak to speak, the coachman had scarcely spoken since we arrived, and I believe Eco and Terzo held their peace. Perhaps Hide and Jahlee did as well-but Mora, Sfido, and I chattered away like monkeys.



The guard seemed not to hear anything we said, but leveled his long weapon at me. It was not a pike or spear, although it resembled both. "Are you a torturer?"



"What?"



"I said, are you a torturer? Are you in their guild?" He jerked his head to indicate something more distant than the cemetery that shingled the broad hillside behind him with stone.



I said no, not so much to deny it as because I did not understand him.



"The Matachin Tower?"



I shook my head and said that I had never heard of such a place.



"You've got that sword," he pointed to it, "and those clothes."



"I do, but I'm a stranger here."



Morello said, "The Duko's been stabbed." With an expressive gesture, he pointed out the wound.



"We've bandaged him, but he's lost too much blood."



The guard nodded; if he had understood, nothing in his face showed it.



"He needs a physician," Mora declared.



Sfido added, "Or captors with sense enough to let him die."



Morello protested, and Hide stepped between them.



Colonel Terzo blurted, "If our Duko dies, he dies too!," and shot the omophagist a look of venomous hatred.



Mora's eyes flashed. "You're not master here!"



"Tie my hands then, and carry Rigoglio yourself. I say that if Rigoglio dies, he dies!"



Eco growled. His hand was on the hilt.



"I'd sooner set him free," Mora told Terzo angrily, "than let you kill him. I'd sooner give him his knife back and let him kill you."



The guard shouted for silence, Oreb croaked, "No talk," and Jahlee giggled.



"Nobody's killing nobody." The guard turned his strange weapon on the omophagist. "Not unless I give the order."



"Well said," I told him.



"And you-where's your sword?"



I held out my hands. "I have none."



Rigoglio raised his big head as though it were almost too heavy for him to lift. "Our friend is a witch, a strego. As you see."



"That does it!" The guard beckoned to Jahlee. "Are you with them?"



"Do you want me to be?"



He stared at her as if unable to think of a reply, cursing in a monotonous whisper.



"No die!" Oreb was speaking to Rigoglio, and I bent to listen to him, realizing that Oreb had heard something I had not.



"Don't feel pity for me, Incanto." I could scarcely make out the words. "I don't mind anymore."



Sfido asked me, "Can't you breathe new life into him?"



I shook my head yet again. "I've tried. I thought you wanted him dead."



"I do. But I want him standing before a wall to have his brains blown out."



The guard was taking off his military cloak. He gave it to Jahlee. "You put this on. Put it on now."



"Red's a good, dramatic color, isn't it?" She threw it over her shoulders and spread it wide, one foot on tiptoe, the knee bent. "Can you make a mirror for me, Rajan?"



"Perhaps I could," I told her. "I won't."



"You don't have to. I see myself reflected in his eyes." She told the guard, "You can look. Go ahead. You can touch, too, if you're nice."



For a moment I had feared that Hide might shoot him. His voice shook me from my reverie instead. "Father?"



"Yes. What is it?"



Fog was rising from the marsh like the fog that had risen from the river as that other-whorlly evening grew chill. I thought of Nettle's seeing the ghosts rise from Lake Limna on the last summer that she and her parents had vacationed there.



"What were you thinking about, Father?"



"Fogs and mists. They are almost as insubstantial as shadows, Hide. Yet they can unite our experiences in bonds of iron."



Following my eyes, he too looked out over the marsh. A solitary bird flew there, and for a moment I supposed that it was Oreb; but it flew on, intent like me upon returning to its nest.



"There was white sea fog," I told Hide, "a much thicker fog than this, when Krait and I put out in the sloop to look for Seawrack."



"Who's that?"



"The singer that Colonel Terzo and I hear at times."



Hide was silent once more and so was I, remembering the caresses of two lips and a single hand.



At length. "Father, can I ask you an important question?"



"Of course."



"It's going to seem pretty foolish to you.



Probably it will. But it's important to me just the same."



"I understand, my son."



"When... Sometimes you act like my questions aren't very important."



I nodded. "Sometimes you question me out of mere curiosity, or when I'm deep in other thoughts. I have complaints to make of you, Hide, just as you have complaints to make of me. Perhaps we ought to be more tolerant of each other."



"I'll try. This is my question, Father. When you were my age, did you understand the whorl you lived in? The Long Sun Whorl?"



"When I was your age, Hide, I no longer lived there. Your mother and I had been married, your brother Sinew had been born, and we were here on Blue." Recollections of struggle and despair displaced the golden days. "We weren't living on the Lizard yet, but we were here."



Hide began to speak; I raised my hand. "To answer your question, when I was your age I understood neither the Long Sun Whorl nor this one in which I was then living. I still don't. I understand more than you, perhaps. Perhaps. But I don't understand everything. You believe that I'm trying to withhold knowledge from you."



"I know you are, Father." His tone was firm and a little angry.



"I've already told you a great deal. A great deal that you've paid scant attention to, and a great deal that you've rejected because it has not fallen in with your preconceptions."



Grudgingly, "Sometimes."



"As you say. When I was younger than you are now, Hide, and lived in the Whorl, my father tried to teach me a great deal about his shop and its affairs. He sold paper, quills, ink, pencils, account books, and the like. I know I've told you about that."



"Yes, Father."



"I shut my ears to it. I have often wished since that I had heard him with the greatest attention. He wanted me to operate his shop, you see, when he grew old. I was determined not to. At times when I felt I had your entire attention, I have tried to tell you what I have, in ways that I believed you might recall after many years."



"I'm listening, now, Father. Really I am."



I, too, was listening, in the same way that I stopped to listen again a minute or two ago. Mostly I was listening for any sound that might herald Oreb's return; but I heard only the snort and stamp of one of our horses, and the slow beating of wings wider and softer than Oreb's.



"Aren't you going to tell me anything?"



"Perhaps. Hide, there is one matter, one very important matter, upon which I cannot speak. In the past I've tried to turn the subject when you came too near to it, and I suppose I will again."



"You understand about the Vanished People. I know you do."



"I do not."



He ignored it. "It seems to me like they're the key. If I could just understand them, I'd understand everything, even that place we went to when you thought we were going to Green. Only it wasn't Green, was it?"



I shook my head.



"What was it?"



"Duko Rigoglio said it was the Short Sun Whorl, the whorl from which he had been taken by force long ago to be put aboard the Whorl. To be put into the Long Sun Whorl, I ought to say, perhaps."



"But it was way too long, Father. You said that yourself. Thousands and thousands of years."



I nodded. "So I did, and so it was. That is why I will not call it the Short Sun Whorl."



His next question surprised me. "Do you think they buried him in that big cemetery?"



"Rigoglio? No."



"They said they would."



"So they did."



The guard had locked the gate, saying he was doing us a favor. "I could take you up the short way, there's a break in the wall up there, and I know how to find it."



I remarked that the long road was often the shortest in the long run.



"Only we'd have to go through the Old Yard, and come up on the barbican from in back. That's not regular." He paused. "Some that went in the Old Yard might not come out, too, if you take my meaning. Now get moving, all of you."



I walked beside him, Hide just ahead of us. "Are you bringing us to a physician?"



"To the lochage."



"Your officer?"



He nodded. "What's her name? The one with my cloak?"



" "Jahlee.



"Jahlee! You get back here!"



She smiled at him. "Were you afraid I was going to run away?"



"You wouldn't get far, but you wouldn't be any use to me after, either."



Hide shot a glance at him that I hoped he did not see.



"That's mine you got on, and that means you're mine. Get me? You're not with the rest, you're separate."



"And yours." She had taken up a position on his left (I myself was on his right), and she linked her arm with his.



It had been a long and a weary walk, and we were all tired already. Duko Rigoglio had collapsed. His friends had carried him until they could carry him no longer; then the guard had stopped a wagon and compelled the driver to take all of us to the barbican, a low, frowning, thick-walled fortress built on arches over a dry ditch.



"We'll bury him there." The guard had jerked his thumb toward the cemetery. "Only not up here. Close to the river."



I shook my head. "He must live."



But the lochage was of the guard's opinion and told me that I was a master of the torturers' guild.



"I am not," I insisted. "We are poor travelers, visitors. We reached this city of yours only today, following the river north. I have never tortured anyone, and never will."



"He had a sword, too," the guard told the lochage, "only he did something with it when I wasn't looking. The rest say he's a witch."



The lochage nodded thoughtfully, dipped his pen, and scribbled on a scrap of parchment.



"He needs blood," Jahlee told him. "Understand, I don't care if he lives or dies. It's nothing to me. But he needs blood. He's bled nearly dry, anybody can see that."



The lochage looked up from his scrap of parchment. "Are you with them, strumpet?"



"I was, but I'm with him now." She pointed to the guard.



"Then get her out of here."



The guard obeyed.



The lochage motioned to me. "You're the leader?"



"I suppose so."



"Then I'm holding you responsible for the rest. Do you know where the Bear Tower is?"



I insisted quite truthfully that I had never been to this city before and had no idea where anything was.



"I'll send a boy with you." He handed me the parchment. "I've told them to doctor him, or try to, and put the rest of you up tonight. They get him."



He pointed to the omophagist. "That's their pay.



He'll die in the pit, which is better than he deserves."



I started to protest.



"He stabbed your friend, didn't he? You saw it?"



I nodded.



"All right then. Let him go fight a mastiff."



The omophagist spat at the lochage then, and the guard struck him methodically twice, forehand and back.



"Now, listen to me," the lochage said. "Your friend's likely to die. I've seen more wounds than I ever wanted to, and I think he'll die tonight. The bear keepers throw their dead beasts out with the refuse. I've told them they can't do that with him. It's all in that order I just gave you. They're to bury him like one of their own guild."



Chapter 23



Why Are the Inhumi Like Us?



"Father?"



I looked up at Hide, half expecting to see the stone walls and smoldering cressets of the guardroom. The desolate wastes of the marsh stretched behind him instead, eerily illuminated by starlight and Green's virescent glow.