In Green's Jungles (35 page)

"He has enough common decency not to insult a man about to die? That's rarer than you might think. He could simply have had me shot. I realize that."

"No cut," Oreb cautioned.

"You'll be tried by the Corpo, I suppose. I doubt that they'll sentence you to death."

"They'll have to." The Duko shook his head gloomily. "Not that I could return to power after this. And Pas knows-" He paused in the midst of his thought. "It is Pas, isn't it, here? Our god-in-chief?"

"No, it isn't, Your Grandeur. Or at least I do not believe so."

"Poor man!"

"I probed a nerve, didn't I? Let's talk about something else. You speak of me as Duko Rigoglio, I've heard you. It must have struck you by now that Rigoglio can't have been my name originally."

It had not, and I said so.

"My name was Roger. That's what was printed on my tube, anyway. Roger. I'd like it on my stone, if they let me have one."

I said again that Blanko had no compelling reason to take his life.

"Just the same, I want it, if you can manage it. They'll put Duko Rigoglio on there, and that's all right. But I'd like for it to say Roger someplace, too, if that's possible." The Duko sat silent again for a time, clearly lost in thought.

He shook himself. "A woman I knew called me Rigoglio, and other people took it up. Do you know how I made myself Duko?"

I said, "I've been assuming that you were chosen by your people in some fashion, Your Grandeur."

"They'd gotten used to having a Duko back on the Whorl, the Duko of Grandecitta. They were glad to get out from under his thumb here, or said they were. The facts were that they didn't know how to run things for themselves, or even how to try. I didn't like being called Rigoglio, so I started calling myself Duko. A man objected, and I knocked him down. In a day or so, I had half a dozen young fellows hanging around me, anxious to do the knocking down for me."

"I see."

"After that I settled quarrels. If you were a friend of mine, you won. If you weren't, I gave the nod to the weaker party, and chopped off your head if I could find an excuse. A couple of months of that, and everybody in town was a loyal supporter."

I nodded while making a mental note.

"I remembered Pas, or whatever his name was. It was pretty much what he'd done, only on a larger scale. He came in on the side of his friends, and when there was a war with one country stronger than the other, he was generally for the weak one, and you only lost a war to him once."

The Duko rubbed his eyes. "What did you put in your wine, Master Incanto?"

"Nothing, Your Grandeur," I said, "and I've been drinking it myself."

"It's not down in the fire-"

"Watch out!" Oreb spread his wings in alarm.

"It's up over it."

I looked where he had indicated, and saw Mucor's shadowy figure coalesce there as if seated upon the smoke. "Babbie's come back," she told me matter-of-factly. "I wondered if you still wanted him."

"Why, yes. Yes, I do, if I may have him."

"That's good, he misses you. I'll send him."

The smoke swirled as she vanished; and just as it had been in the old days beneath the Long Sun, I thought-too late-of a dozen things I ought to have asked her.

"Girl gone?" Oreb inquired. He clacked his bill and rustled his feathers. "Ghost girl?"

I told him she was, and made the mistake of adding that I wished she would come back.

"Bird gone!" He took wing and vanished into the night.

"He's a night chough," I explained to the Duko. "Don't worry about him, He can see in the dark much better than you and I can at noon."

"I wasn't worried about him," the Duko muttered.

SAY FATHER

I
wrote late last night (too late, to admit the truth) and still did not set down everything I had intended. Now here I sit, writing once more while everyone else is asleep; and even though I have not gotten to make my little experiment, I have far more to write about than patience to write it.

Or paper, for that matter.

Oreb came back this morning, and remembering how I had boasted to the Duko about his acuity of vision I told him to find me a stone table.

Soon he was back, quite elated by his success. "Big table! Stone table. White table. Bird find! On hill. Watch bird!" With much more. I promised to watch, and off he flew due north.

I told Duko Sfido that I was going to retrace our journey for an hour's ride or about that, and instructed him to continue toward Blanko. "This is a good horse," I said, "and I should be able to catch up to you tonight."

Certainly there was nothing to worry about; but whether he was really worried or not, he seemed very worried indeed. "If this is absolutely necessary, I'd like to send a couple of troopers with you."

Oreb returned, flying in circles overhead and calling, "See god! Watch bird! See god!"

I said, "Its necessity is not the question, Your Grandeur. I am going to do it. It is a private matter, a matter of my private devotions, and I am not going to take away two of the troopers Inclito gave us to help guard his prisoners. Or one, or any other number." With that, I turned and rode away before Sfido could stop me.

I had said an hour's ride, because I had told Oreb that I was interested only in tables not far from us. To give him his due, the altar he found for me would have been less than an hour distant if the ride had been over level ground. In the event, my horse was forced to pick his way across rocky little gullies and up and down the barren, windswept hills, which made my ride closer to three hours than one. With Hyacinth's azoth virtually out of reach under my greatcoat, robe, and tunic, my mind dwelt apprehensively on wild beasts and stragglers from the Horde of Soldo, without my actually seeing the smallest sign of either.

The cold and the wind were more immediate enemies. I pulled my looted greatcoat tight about me and muffled my face against the wind, just as I had when I rode with Sfido, but it seemed colder than it had ever been before, perhaps merely because I was facing into the wind, or perhaps merely because winter had advanced another step that morning. Those who live largely in houses or in warm climates, as I have, do not know cold. On my long, lonely ride today, cold and I at last shook handsmine, of course-and exchanged unpleasantries that left me with the cough that is keeping me awake tonight. When I rode, my feet froze. Dismounting and leading my horse warmed me somewhat, but slowed our progress.

The altar Oreb had found was on a hilltop, as I expected, and the climb was difficult: up the side of a flat-topped hill whose gentlest slope was practically straight up, until at last, perspiring in spite of the cold, I was able to pull myself over the edge, and stand upright on smooth rock more level than your kitchen floor.

I had expected that the altar would be a mere flat stone not much diferent from the one beneath which I had laid Fava to rest, a rough slab of fire-blacked slate resting on three or four boulders. What I found instead was a wide rectangle of some white mineral so fine in grain it might almost have been a kind of glass, sup ported by twelve graceful pillars of a metal that I am going to call bronze until we can speak face-to-face. The Neighbors had danced around it once; I knew that as soon as I saw it and the floor of living rock that they had leveled and smoothed with so much care. They had danced, and their watching gods, with their feet upon the stars, had smiled and bent in honest friendship to accept a morsel from a table fit for gods.

Sinew had found an altar of the Vanished People in a wood, and had tried to persuade me to visit it without exposing himself to the humiliation of my refusal. Now I wonder what wonders I missed by my surly rejection of his implied invitation. Was it an altar like the one to which Oreb guided me today? If not, in what respects did it differ, and why? Did Sinew himself worship there? If he did, did he experience what I experienced today, or anything of the kind? Have you visited the place, Nettle? I am eager to talk to you about all this.

Sinew is still on Green, assuming that he is (unlike his father) still alive. On Green and so unreachable, as Sfido's friend Gagliardo would doubtless tell us. But I and others will visit Green's jungles tomorrow night if my experiment succeeds. If I can locate Sinew, I will ask him about the altar he found in order that we can find it ourselves, assuming that Hide and I succeed in returning to the Lizard; if it is as remarkable as the altar to which Oreb led me, it will be well worth visiting more than once.

Ever since my boyhood, it has seemed to me that it is a species of insult to the immortal gods to pray at their altars without sacrificing, provided that sacrifice is possible. If I still had the long, straight, single-edged knife I used to carry when I was Rajan of Gaon, I would have thought seriously about sacrificing Oreb. I do not believe that I could have nerved myself to do it, but I cannot help wondering what the result would have been. My horse would have made a sacrifice worthy of the Grand Manteion, to be sure; but I could not spare him, and I had no knife other than the azoth (as I said), and no means of getting him onto the hilltop.

There will be a barn for him tomorrow, poor creature. A barn and hay-corn or oats if I can find them, though I have little hope of that.

When I had rejected both sacrifices, my next thought was to pray as I would have at a shrine. I tried, kneeling on the level living rock with my head swathed in my scarf, and mumbling a few of the prayers I have not yet forgotten. When I have failed in prayer in the past, I have generally felt myself ludicrous, like the little boy in the story who prayed that Hierax would fly off with the larger boy next door and drop him on the head of some evildoer.

Not so today-my prayers were beneath even Comus's goodnatured raillery. When I was in the schola, I once asked why those spirits who had been thrust from the Aureate Path could not save themselves by prayer; and I was told that they could not praythat although we, the living, might pray for them, they themselves could only mouth the words of prayers, words that left their lips without effecting any interior change. So it was with me, as I knelt before that cold altar and felt its hunger. I was like a barren woman who longs to conceive, but cannot conceive although she lies with three-score men.

At last I rose and lifted my face to the dark winter sky. "I have no knife for a sacrifice," I said, and I spoke aloud as one man does to another. "Even if I had my old knife back, I would not give you Oreb, who has led me here to you. You will reclaim us both quickly enough. But you did not condemn me-or at least I dare to hope that you did not-when I sacrificed for Olivine."

I opened the leather burse that Volanta gave me when we left Blanko, found the piece of Soldese flatbread I had put there before setting out, and struck by the idea of sharing the simple meal we shared with our prisoners at midday, climbed down and fetched the last of my wine from my saddlebag. The second climb should have been worse than the first, yet it was not. I was tired, my ankle pained me; and my fingers, which had been cold from the beginning, were colder than ever. But all the emptiness I had felt when I had tried to pray, had vanished so completely I could almost believe they had never been. I was happy and more, and if an old instructor had appeared and demanded to know the reason for my joy, I would only have laughed at him for needing causes and explanations in so simple a matter. I was alive, and the Outsider who knows very well what sort of creature I am-cared about me in spite of all.

"This is what I have," I told him, and raised my bread and my bottle, displaying them to the low, gray clouds. "I beseech you to share them with me, and I pray that you will not object to me and my animals sharing them with you." Then I broke the bread in two, laid half of it upon his altar, and poured wine over it, cautioning Oreb not to touch it. After that, I wet a bit with a little wine and gave it to Oreb, ate a bite myself, drank deeply from the bottle and recorked it, and put away what remained of the bread.

He came, and stood behind me on the hilltop.

I have been preparing myself to describe that the whole time I have been writing, and now that the moment has come I am as wordless as my horse.

I knew that he was there, that if I turned, I would see them.

I also knew that it was not permitted me, that it would be an act of disobedience for which I would be forgiven but whose consequences I would suffer.

Just now I got up to think, walking around our camp. Oreb is off looking for something to eat. "Bird hunt," he said. It recalled Krait, flying away from our boat after Seawrack and I had gone to bed.

Both Dukos are sleeping. So are Private Cuoio, General Morello, and the coachman and the rest of the troopers. Only Colonel Terzo was awake, staring at me with frightened eyes before pretending to sleep.

None of which matters.

That, I believe, is what I ought to tell you, although it is by no means exact. In the presence of the Outsider, I was conscious of another whorl. Not a remote one like Green or the Long Sun Whorl that you and I grew up in, but a whorl that is as present to us as this one, a place all around us that we cannot see into. Many would say that it is not real, but that is almost the reverse of truth. It is the things of this whorl that are unreal by the standards of that one.

Think of a picture. Do you remember the wonderful pictures in the Calde's Palace, and how we went through all those empty rooms taking off dustcovers and looking wide-eyed at the rich furniture and the pictures? Surely you must.

We are there still, Nettle, as Silk and Hyacinth still kneel by the pool in Ermine's.

There was a picture of a worried man writing at a little table while his wife crocheted, remember that one? Was the man actually present?

He was present in the picture, there can be no doubt of that. If he had not been, we would have seen a picture of a young, unhappy-looking woman crocheting alone.

That is how it is for us. The hill on which I found the altar was really there-in the whorl that we are so prone to believe is the only whorl; but it is no more real than the table at which that man wrote, and for as long as the Outsider remained with me I knew that.