In Green's Jungles tbotss-2

by Gene Wolfe

  "I'd like to know, " Rimando challenged us all with his eyes, "precisely what these gods, two gods I've never so much as heard of, had to say about us. I don't believe in them. Less even than your friend believed in the Vanished People, if that's possible." (This last was addressed to Mora.) "But I want to know. It's my right, and Eco's too."

  Salica inquired rather timidly, "Why don't you believe in the gods?" Rimando snorted, and she gave me a pleading glance.

  "You see, " I told her, "as soon as you silence me, you find that you require my speech."

  Eco tried to restore harmony. "I think I'd prefer not to know. It was a private sacrifice, they say. Let it stay private."

  "I'm of your mind, " I told him. "The interesting question isn't what I read in the entrails of this young bull. An augur with sufficient imagination can read whatever you like in the entrails of whatever beasts you choose, and predictions made at sacrifice fail at least as often as they succeed-more often, in my experience."

  Rimando asked, "Is one of us to die? Which one?"

  "No, " Mora told him. "There wasn't anything like that."

  "Nor is the interesting question why Rimando doesn't believe in gods, " I continued. "It is why anyone should. Why didn't Fava believe in the Vanished People, Mora? The answer may prove enlightening." -

  "Because they have vanished. She knew that they were here once. I mean she'd seen the things people show that they say were theirs, things that have been dug up, you know. And last year one of Father's hands found a little statue when he cleaned out our well."

  "I'd like to see it."

  Inclito glanced up from his plate. "I'll show you right after dinner."

  "Only she said they were gone, and that was why they're called the Vanished People. If they were still here, we'd know all about them and see them every day."

  I nodded. "Anything that's seldom seen is assumed to belong to the remote past, even when it was last seen yesterday."

  Rimando began, "I want to know-"

  "Of course you do. This is my fault; I may have misread the gods' message, and in fact I probably did. I thought it said that only one of you would set out in the morning."

  Inclito broke the silence that followed by picking up the small bell beside his mother's plate and ringing it. A smiling Torda appeared at once, and he told her, "I'd like a little horseradish. Would you ask Decina for some, please? I know it's not your job."

  "I'll grate some for you myself, sir. I know right where it is."

  Rimando cleared his throat. "It didn't say which one of us wouldn't go?"

  "I don't know, " I told him. "Quite possibly that was written there as well, but if so I was too obtuse to read it."

  Mora said, "Wouldn't the gods know you couldn't, and not bother writing it?"

  I shrugged.

  "You want to ask why I don't believe in the gods, all of you, " Rimando declared, "but you're afraid to ask me, or too polite."

  "Not at all, " I told him. "By this time you should have seen enough of our host to know that though he is extremely brave, he is never polite."

  Inclito dropped his knife and fork, and roared with laughter.

  "He has many excellent qualities. He's both intelligent and shrewd, for example, a rare combination. Mora, you love your father, I know. What is it you like so much about him?"

  From his place on the hearth, Oreb croaked loudly, "Good man!"

  "He is." Mora nodded. "But that's not why I love him. It's hard to explain."

  "Do you want to try?"

  "I think so. It's that he loves whatever he's doing. He made me a house for my doll when I was small, and he loved doing that, just like he loved building onto this house and then building more, or putting up a new barn. I played with his dollhouse, and you know how children are. After a while it didn't look as nice, so he fixed it for me and repainted it, and he loved doing that, even when he'd been working hard all day."

  Torda returned from the kitchen with a saucer of horseradish and a spoon. Inclito took it from her and dumped half of it onto his plate, then held out the rest to us.

  Only Eco accepted. "Your daughter mentioned a little statue, you were going to show it to Incanto. I'd like to see it myself. Would that be all right?"

  "Absolutely, " Inclito told him. "There are some other things, too."

  "In Gaon they've got a cup that belonged to their rajan, the one that disappeared."

  Inclito nodded.

  "The Vanished People are supposed to have given it to him, and it certainly looks like some work of theirs I've seen. They say it cures the sick, and they keep it in the temple of their goddess."

  Mora came in as I was writing cures. "Not in my nightgown this time, " she said, and tapped her riding boots with her quirt.

  "Nor with Fava, " I remarked. "I like this much better." more." She paused. "I've been out in the stable just now with "But with the same questions she and I had last night, and Rimando. He wanted to see about his horse, see that it was comfortable and had enough water. Only when he got me out there he had a thousand questions, just like me."

  She seemed to expect me to smile, so I did.

  "I couldn't answer most of them, but when I got back to my room and started to undress for bed"

  "You became curious yourself, " I suggested.

  "I was already. That's why Fava and I came last night. But I need somebody to talk to. That used to be Fava, but she's gone now."

  "What about your father and your grandmother?"

  "It wouldn't be like talking to Fava. Or to you."

  She sat in silence for a few seconds while I finished the sentence I had begun when she knocked, and wiped my pen.

  "That man Eco talked about, the man down south who was looking for his father. Do you have a son?"

  I nodded.

  "Because you thought he might be looking for you. That's the way it seemed to Rimando, and it seemed like that to me, too."

  I asked whether she thought Rimando attractive.

  "That has nothing to do with it."

  Oreb croaked a warning: "Look out!"

  "Of course it does. You went to the stable with him."

  "I wanted to see their horses, that's all. Did you see them when they came?"

  I shook my head.

  "They've got wonderful horses, both of them. A chestnut for Eco and a bay for Rimando. Father got two of the richest men in Blanko to contribute a horse apiece. I'd like to know how he does that."

  "So would I."

  "Uh huh. You don't know anything, do you, Incanto?"

  "At least, I know how little I know."

  "Did you really think that could have been your son looking for his father down south?"

  "No." It required a good deal of resolve to tell the truth. "I didn't think it could possibly be. But I hoped it was."

  "I think the father that he said he was looking for would have been younger than you are. He didn't sound a lot like you, either."

  I nodded.

  "You don't know who it was?"

  "I have no idea – none. You'll want to know whether Eco's description would fit my son. No, it would not. My son's name is Sinew."

  "That's what you said."

  "It is. He may be calling himself something else – I have no way of knowing. But the young man Eco talked about didn't sound like my son. You indicated that you came with many of the same questions you and Fava had last night; this cannot have been one of them. What are they?"

  She waved their questions aside. "You wrote those letters."

  "The ones that Rimando and Eco are going to carry to Olmo and Novella Citta? Yes, I did. I wrote them with your father's permission, and he read them before he signed them. Do you want to know what was in them?"

  Mora shook her head. "Rimando's is in his saddlebag. I could go out to the stable right now and read it if I wanted to. I could, but I'd have to break the seal. Does that bother you? That I could read it?"

  "Not in the slightest."

  "All right."
She leaned forward, her brutal, girlish face intent. "For just a minute, this morning just before Decina came, we were someplace else. Fava and I were, I think, and I asked Torda about it and she said she was too. Was that Green?"

  I nodded again.

  "You did it to turn me against Fava."

  "I didn't do it at all. Not consciously at least."

  "But you've been there? Is that what you call the jungle? What we saw and smelled and felt?"

  "Yes, it is. I have not said so."

  "At dinner yesterday you got inside Fava's story and changed things around. Did it really happen?"

  "I suppose it did. I didn't do it consciously."

  "Good Silk!"

  For half a minute or longer, Mora studied me, her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. At last she said, "I meant what Fava told about. Did that really happen? Did you try to use an inhuma to fool your son?"

  "No."

  "It was just made up?"

  I nodded. "I've told you I don't know how I did those things, if I did them. That was the truth, but I've been thinking a lot about them, as you can imagine. Would you like to hear my theory? Telling someone else may make it clearer in my own mind."

  "Go ahead."

  "Suppose that the Duko were to build a road to facilitate the passage of his horde to the border. Might not troopers from Blanko use that same road to besiege Soldo?"

  "I don't think I understand this."

  "Neither do I, but I'm trying to. Have you ever seen a dead inhumu? One who had been personating a human being?"

  "You told me that I hadn't seen one at all. I still haven't, not close up."

  "I have, and more often than I like."

  Those were magic words, although I had been ignorant of their power when I pronounced them. As a small boy I had heard the stories all children hear, and used to imagine that if only I could stumble upon the correct syllables a garden would spring up where our neighbors' houses stood, a place of mystery and beauty in which the trees bore emeralds that turned to diamonds as they ripened, and fountains ran with milk or wine. Eventually I came to realize that the immortal gods were the only spirits who granted the wishes of men, and that prayers were the magic words I had sought. It thrilled me, as it still does; but when I told my friends my discovery, they only sneered and turned away.

  Now – very far from those friends, men and women I will never see again – I had stumbled upon words that were magic indeed. No sooner had I pronounced them than I found myself back in Green's jungles, squatting beside the young man who had joined us and fought beside us, as he writhed and bled beneath the arching roots.

  "Tell me again why you hate the inhumi, " he asked, as if we two were sitting at ease in my bedroom in Inclito's house, and had all the time in the whorl.

  "I've never told you anything of the kind, " I said, "or talked to you at all until this moment."

  "You'll know me when I'm gone."

  "They drink our blood. Isn't that enough?"

  "No." His face was a mask of pain.

  "Incanto?" Mora was concerned for me.

  "What is it?"

  "Are you all right?"

  I nodded. "His mother – Krait's mother – she was the one, you see. We were as poor… You've been rich all your short life. You can't imagine how poor we were."

  "I could try."

  "We had shared out everything when we landed, we who had come from Old Viron and the new people, the sleepers, the ones who had slept three hundred years in the caverns of the Whorl. Do you know about them, Mora? Their memories had been tampered with, like Mamelta's, so they were confused in strange ways."

  No doubt she thought I was one of them, for which I cannot blame her; but she nodded politely.

  "The tools and the seeds and the frozen embryos, though there weren't many of those. No human embryos at all. They'd been taken, every one of them. Special talents, you see – untamed and unpredictable abilities that were supposed to help us; but they had been taken by those who had broken the seals. Taken and sold, long ago."

  "No cut, " Oreb advised me. "Good Silk!"

  "Silk had been one of them. Silk had been our leader. That was his talent, leadership. People trusted and followed him, and he tried-I tried very hard, Mora, not to mislead them, not to lead them astray and betray them. But Silk had remained behind in the Whorl with Hyacinth, and it almost destroyed us."

  "I see, " Mora said, although clearly she did not.

  "Our women were supposed to bear the animals, exactly as Maytera Marble's granddaughter had, bear horses and sheep and cattle and donkeys. Nettle couldn't, because she was carrying Sinew, and so we gave ours to a woman she had known all her life who promised to give it back to us when it was born. But she didn't, she wouldn't. She said it had been stillborn. Many of them were, but that one was not. She hid it from us until she thought we wouldn't know, and it was only a little, long-necked animal, like a little camel without a hump, after all. It wouldn't plow, and she and the man who lived with her killed it trying to make it plow, and so we were so poor – Nettle and I were so poor – because Silk had not come.

  "We sold part of the land they had given us, and bought a donkey, but the donkey died. Eventually we sold the rest of our land and ate what little we got for it, and bought milk for Sinew when Nettle's dried up, and lived in a tent on the Lizard, a little tent I made for us from the skins of the rock goats I hunted. That was when she came, Krait's mother, and Sinew nearly died.

  "My son's name was Krait, did I tell you?"

  Poor Mora shook her head. "You said your son's name was Sinew."

  "Yes. Yes, it was. But when he died – when Krait died there in the jungle – the illusion was last to die. I think it always is. The illusion of humanity. It is a thing of the spirit, you see, and so partakes of immortality. The spirit is the breath, Mora."

  She nodded again, hesitantly; I could not tell whether she understood everything or nothing.

  "They reshape themselves. That is the animal. That was how they lived and how they reproduced until the Neighbors came and found them, and were themselves found by them. It is the animal, as I said.

  A chemical woman like Maytera Marble carries within her half the plans necessary to build a new chem, and a chemical man like Hammerstone, the other half, did you know that? It was how they began to build Olivine. You've probably never seen a chem."

  I showed her the eye I am bringing to Maytera Marble.

  "The animal part is easy. We had lizards at home that could change their skins to look like human skin, and there are bugs that shape themselves to look like other bugs, or like sticks, or the heads of deadly snakes. When an inhumu dies, it seems to be a human being – Krait seemed to be a young man there to the end, there in Green's jungles. A young man when he died and for some time afterward. When it was too late, I saw him as I had seen him on the sloop."

  There was a mirror above the bureau; I went to it and stood before it trembling. "Do you see this face, Mora? Of course you do. It is the only face you can see. It is not my face, however. Come and look."

  "I won't!"

  "Poor girl!" Oreb flew to her, and would have comforted her if he could.

  "Suppose that Fava were to die, Mora, and that you waited at her deathbed as I waited beside Krait. I had stayed behind, you see, because he had fought for us. I had been wounded too, but I tried to get some of the others to carry him. They would not, Mora. I ordered them to, but they only shook their heads and turned away, even Sinew; and in the end they would not carry me either. They left me just as they had left him, and I made myself stand and go back to him.

  "You would hear Fava's last words, just as I heard his. Perhaps she would tell you the secret, the great secret they fear so much that we will learn. You would hear the rattle of Hierax in her throat, the rattle that he kept and would not allow his younger sisters to play with. In a second or two, she would cease to breathe. Do you understand, Mora? Am I making myself clear?"

  She nodded.<
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  "Still-still! – you would see the child you had known as Fava lying in her bed. Her face would appear shrunken, its full cheeks pale and not so full. Yet still Fava, a human being of about your own age."

  "She got a lot older just before she went away, " Mora said hesitantly. "Like Grandmother."

  "Because so much of her food had been taken from your grandmother while she slept. Foolish people think that they will see the marks of the fangs, and there will be blood on the sheets. The truth is that the marks are small and white, and do not bleed. An inhumu's fangs are round, you see, and the wounds made by all such round things close themselves, unless they are very large. In addition, I imagine that Fava was wise enough to bite your grandmother in a place where she couldn't see her wounds – on her back, perhaps, or on the backs of her legs.

  "You would see Fava lying there dead, exactly as you had always known her. Then you would blink away tears, or look aside for a moment; and when you looked back at her, you would see something that did not look human at all, a beast dressed like a girl, its scaly face painted and powdered, and its hair a wig. Around New Viron, farmers like your father put up lay figures to frighten birds. Do they do that here, too?"

  She nodded again.

  "Have you ever seen one from a distance when you were out riding, and thought it a real person?"

  "I think I understand, but I still don't understand how you took us to Green before breakfast."

  "Because the illusion was there, and was strong-when I looked at Fava I saw a girl, though I knew better. She was impressing her reality upon my mind, just as the Duko wants to impress the governmental system of his town upon Blanko. But something in my mind seized the links Fava had forged between the three of us and herself, shouting its own reality, which was and is mine. There were bugles and trumpets all along the road, Mora, and the crash and rattle of marching men with slug guns. All of that was exactly as Duka Fava had intended, but the men were not hers."

  "I think I understand, " Mora said slowly.

  "I hope so. I don't believe I can explain it any better than I have."