In Green's Jungles (7 page)

Solenno was a trifle taller than Gioiosio, as well as I can remember. Or perhaps it is only that time has made him seem so. His body was still covered with mud when they brought it into the house. I have hated the sight of mud ever since, as my son will tell you. Old Schiamazza had to help my mother wash him. I could not do it. The embalmers washed him again, or so they assured me, but his body smelled of mud until the coffin was closed, even though it had been embalmed and dressed in clean, new clothes.

I talked to my mother one night. I cannot say now how long after Solenno's death it was. A week or two, or a month. Something like that. I was in despair. I did not know what to do. I told her over and over how much I had loved Turco, and I said that for me it was as though Turco had died three times.

She nodded and hugged me and heard me out, and when I had talked and wept until I could weep no more she said, "You have been trying to find him again. I thought so all along, and now I know it. Solenno looked somewhat like him, everybody saw it. And Gioioso always made me think of Turco. Their voices and gestures were just the same."

I sighed, perhaps, and wiped my eyes. I could weep no more, as I have told you.

"Listen to me, my daughter. Turco is dead. You must find someone you can love for himself, not because he reminds you of Turco."

And I did. I found Inclito's father. Do you want to know what he looked like? Look at my son. Big and strong and rough, but good. Such a good man, and he loved me as a deer the plain. He laid his heart at my feet, and we were wed. A month passed. Then two. Then three. A year! I bore a son and lost him, but next year I bore my Inclito. Together we saw him weaned, and watched him learn to walk.

One day my husband showed me a pair of dirty old boots, caked with mud. "Whose are these?" he asked me.

I looked at them. They seemed familiar, but that was all I could tell him.

"These were a trooper's riding boots. Was your brother in the cavalry? Or your father?"

They were Casco's, of course. I don't think that I had so much as mentioned Casco to my husband before that day, but I told him the whole story, exactly as I have told it to you tonight.

"Ah," he said, and he put the boots on the floor and stood beside them. "Too small for me. I could never get my feet in them, and a good thing, too, because there's something in them already."

He picked up the right boot and showed it to me, a sharp white splinter pushed through the leather at the ankle that looked almost like a sliver of bone. "That is a death adder's fang," he explained, "or anyway that's what I think it is. If the man these boots belonged to had kept his sword, he wouldn't have had to kill the thing with his feet, and he might be alive today."

From that you already understand what came before it, I feel certain. Gioioso had found the boots and worn them when he went hunting. The dried poison from the fang had entered his foot slowly until there was enough to stop his heart. Poor Solenno had found them too, in the back of the closet that had become his, and had worn them when he went to look at my father's muddy field.

It is all simple and reasonable, you will say. I am older than any of you, and it seems to me that there is more to be said. Turco had avenged himself, as the strego had warned Casco he would. Have you ever seen another person who reminded you of yourself?

No one? What about you, Fava? Incanto?

You shake your heads. We never do, you see. I have been told many times that such-and-such a woman looks exactly like me. And I have visited her and spoken to her, and come away feeling that no one could resemble me less. So it was with Turco. To my mother and me, Gioioso and Solenno seemed very like Turco. But to Turco himself they resembled Casco. Like Casco, they were rivals for my hand. And they wore boots of the same size, after all.

"That was a fine story," I told her, "one of the best that I've ever heard."

"I had to live it," she replied, "and it is far better to hear such stories than to live them, I promise you, though it ended so happily. Let us hope that neither of these girls has to endure such things."

A cheerful, round-faced young woman in a dirty apron came in to tell us that dinner was ready, and Inclito jumped from his chair. "Wonderful! I'm starving, Onie. Have you cooked up something special for me?"

She winked at him and said, "We think you'll like it," and all five of us followed him into a good-sized dining room with a fire blazing in the fireplace at one end and all four quarters of a yearling steer turning on a spit. Inclito complained of the heat at once and opened two windows, and to tell the truth I would not have been sorry if he had opened two more, though Fava exchanged her seat with Mora in order to sit nearer the fire.

Inclito's mother drew her shawl more tightly about her shoulders. "It's your turn, Incanto. We'll try to pass the food around quietly so you can talk."

Inclito handed me the wine bottle as she spoke. I thanked him and refilled my glass. "I'm very glad that our host's mother's story preceded mine," I began, "because up until then I had been trying to think of one that might win. After hearing it, I realize that I have no chance, and can tell whatever foolish tale I want. That's what I'm going to do, but I have a question for all of you first. I'm not telling my story now, so you can answer me out loud and say anything that you like. Have you ever known anyone who returned alive from Green?"

Mora said, "Nobody can go there. You'd have to have a lander of your own, one that you could make obey you."

Inclito's mother added, "Isn't that where the inhumi come from? That's what everybody says, and the people who went there from the Whorl are all dead."

I looked at Fava, who shook her head.

Inclito rumbled, "How could anybody know where everybody's been?"

"To the best of your knowledge," I told him.

"I think maybe… No." He shook his head. "Not that I know about."

"This story is about a man on Green," I told them. "I'm not asking you to accept it. If you enjoy hearing it tonight, that's more than enough for me."

Here I ought to set down my own story, but I have written myself out already. I will leave it for next time-with Oreb's return, which was actually quite funny. But before I shut up this old pen case that my father must surely have left for me to find, I would like to record a very strange dream I had last night in the shop. I would love to know what it means, and If I don't write about it soon, it seems likely I will forget it.

I was back in the pit, sitting in the middle of it as I actually did for so many hours. A copy of the Chrasmologic Writings lay next to me, a student's copy, thick and small, on very thin paper. Thinking that I might as well prepare my mind for Scylsday, I picked it up and opened it. Opposite the printed page was a picture of Scylla in red, and while I studied the facing page she struggled to escape from hers. I thought, "Oh, yes. What seems like a picture to me seems like a membrane to her, a greased skin stretched tight over the Sacred Window." In my dream this peculiar idea struck me as perfectly true and perfectly ordinary, something that I had known all my life but had rather lost sight of.

At the end of each verse I read, I watched her straining against the page with all ten arms. Very faintly I could hear her cry, "Help! Help!" And then, "Beware! Beware!," like the bird in Inclito's mother's story. I woke up-or thought that I did-but the printed Scylla was still with me, calling out, "Help me! Help me!"

I sat up and stared around at the little stationery shop as though I had never seen paper or ledgers before; and in the precisely the same voice Oreb exclaimed (as he so often does), "Watch out!"

MY OWN STORY: THE MAN WITH THE BLACK SWORD

I
know nothing about Grandecitta, nor do I know what other cities you and your mother may have seen before you left the Whorl, Inclito. But I doubt that you have ever seen a city like the City of the Inhumi on Green. Before I describe it, let me say that it is very hot there and rains a great deal. You must bear both those in mind as you hear this.

The buildings of that city were not built by the inhumi themselves, for the inhumi do not like tools or use them skillfully. Its builders were the Vanished People, the same master builders who began this gracious house of yours. It was a beautiful city in their time, I feel certain, a city of wide streets, welcoming courtyards, and noble towers. A certain woman once said that my old city in the Whorl seemed ugly to her, because most of its buildings had only a story or two, although there were some with five and even six, and we were proud of the towers of our Juzgado. I never got to see her own city, which was said to have so many fine buildings, soaring pinnacles that rose above its palm trees like columns of white smoke some god had turned to stone.

That woman would have loved the City of the Inhumi when it was young, I feel sure; but at the time I am speaking of it was no longer beautiful. Think of a lovely woman, proud and wise. Pic ture to yourself the luminosity of her glance and the grace of her movements. Let yourself hear the music of her voice.

Can you see and hear her, all of you? Now imagine that she has been dead for half a year, and that we are to open her casket. The City of the Inhumi was like that. Its wide streets were littered with rubble and twisted metal, its buildings gray with lichen where they were not green with moss. Great lianas, vines thicker than a strong man's arm, stretched from one tower to another, some so high up that they seemed no more than cobwebs.

The towers of the City of the Inhumi are not of twelve stories, or fifteen, or eighteen, like the towers of the city in which I was born, but of stories beyond counting. Those towers seem to touch the sky even when you are so far from them that they can scarcely be seen. As from the cliffs, trees sprout from their sheer walls and every ledge, and the questing roots of those trees pry out huge blocks of masonry that scar the lower parts of their parent buildings as they crash into the streets. And every insect that spawns in stagnant pools is there, buzzing and stinging.

The man had been given a sword by a man of the Vanished People, a sword that was neither long nor heavy, but very sharp, its blade of a black steel (if it was steel) better than any we know. He ought to have borne it proudly, for it was a much finer sword than the finest he had ever seen, a better sword even than the sword of honor worn by the woman who had disparaged his city. He was too frightened to wear it like that, however; and noble though it was, it did nothing to defend him from the insects. Putting it into its sheath, he contrived to make the sword belt fit him, although it had never been intended for such a body as his, and with the black sword at his side he walked a very long way through the City of the Inhumi in the company of the man of Vanished People who had given him the sword, and the sheath, and the sword belt.

In his company, I said. Yet it often seemed to the man who bore the black sword that he was alone, and sometimes it seemed to him that there was not a single man of the Vanished People beside him but several. There are things that cannot be counted because they are too numerous-the waves of the sea and the leaves in Green's jungles, for example. But there are others that cannot be counted because they cannot be counted, like the ripples in a pond when it rains. The Vanished People are like that at times, a single individual counting as many, and many coalescing into two or three. Or one. At such times it seemed to the man with the black sword that they stood between mirrors that they carried with them.

Or rather, that they had stood so once but had stepped away long ago, and that the doubled and redoubled images they had left behind had taken on lives of their own.

Cruel saw grass and twisted bushes sprouted from every crack in the pavements of the streets they traversed, and these became thicker and thicker, and taller and taller, too, until it seemed almost that the City of the Inhumi had never been, or that it was mere illusion; for its distant towers streaked the cloudy sky with green and gray, but near to hand only the cruel leaves of the saw grass and the contorted limbs met the eye.

They came to a steep stairway after long walking, and the man with the black sword, who had supposed that he trod level ground, was amazed to behold a lower city beneath the City of the Inhumi, a place of slimes and dank caverns dotted with orange and purple fungi, through which a broad river wandered, its black waters as smooth as oil but softly flowing.

"This is the time for wariness," the man of the Vanished People told him.

And another said, "You would be safe from the inhumi, I assured you, and you were safe. There are things worse than inhumi here."

Yet another told him, "You have been safe, but you are safe no longer."

Even as he stood at his side, he saw the one who had given him his sword descending the stairway before him; and he followed him. There was a walkway beside the river, narrow in places and narrower yet in others. And in some wholly crumbled away, leaving only small stones that rolled beneath the feet of the man with the black sword, threatening to carry him into the water.

"How we deceived ourselves!" the man of the Vanished People who had been his guide said. "We thought we were building here for the ages. Another thousand years, and everything you see will be gone."

"How many of us are there?" the man with the black sword asked. He looked about him as he spoke, and saw no one.

"There are two of you," the man of the Vanished People said; and as he did, the man with the black sword saw a corpse face down in the water. He halted then, drew the sword, squatted on the crumbling walkway, and tried to pull the corpse to him with the hooked end of the sword; but he succeeded only in laying open its back, a gaping wound without blood and without pain.

At last, by leaning over the water farther than he dared, he was able to catch the hand of the corpse and move it toward him, but a maggot as thick as his thumb emerged from the cut that he had made, and lifting its blind white head struck at him like a serpent. He jerked backward, nearly falling, then slashed at the maggot and contrived to push away the floating corpse, although the point of his sword sank into it to a depth of four fingers.