In Green's Jungles (6 page)

"I didn't," he says, and that's when he tells me. His brother gets close enough that he can see him, and points his slug gun up against his own chest. "He's got those long arms," Mano says. "I didn't think he could do it, I didn't think he could reach the trigger. I started to laugh. I'll never forgive myself. I laughed at him, and that gave him the nerve to push on the trigger."

We hadn't buried Volto yet, and he's been dead long enough that he wasn't stiff anymore. I got his slug gun and held it to his chest and stretched out his dead arm. It was short-barreled gun, and he was a tall man with long arms. Holding his hand out real straight-look here. Like this he could have done it.

Mano told the judge at his trial, and I spoke for him. Against us, a dozen said the brothers had been enemies. Many times, each had threatened to kill the other one. They liked him and didn't like saying it, but it was the truth and they'd taken the oath. The major thought it was a simple case and told me to hang Mano.

The next day was the one when we learned that war wasn't over. Poliso hit us soon as the shade's up. I put off the hanging, not because I was hoping to save Marto but because I couldn't spare the men. For two days they got us surrounded. It was the worst time for me since my Zitta died. We thought we'd all get killed, but we're going to fight to the end. But it's better if you fight to somebody else's end. We needed to send a message back to Blanko and ask for help, but they were strangling us, shoulderto-shoulder around our position. Nobody could see how it could be done.

I went to the major. "That man that shot his brother I still got locked up," I told him. It never does to argue with people like that once they have made up their minds. "Let me turn him loose and send him back with a letter. If they kill him, they'll have done a dirty job for us. If he gets through, he'll deserve a pardon."

The major makes all kinds of objections the way I'd expected. "All right," I say, "if you won't send him, let me turn him loose and give back his slug gun. I need every man, and he's a good one."

That did it like I knew it would. We sent him and he got through, but he took a slug in the guts. By the time I got home he was dying. I went to see him, and if I'd been a day later that would've been too late. I told him he was a hero, he saved us all, and his family's going to brag about him till Molpe married. "Till Molpe gets married and a year past that." Those were my words exactly. I still remember them. And I tell him, "Twenty years, and I'll be bragging to my Mora's children that I was your officer."

The pardon came while I sat beside his bed, a big white envelope from the corpo with a white silk ribbon and a big, thick red seal that Mano was too weak to break. I opened it for him and read it to him, and he smiled. Already his face was yellow like butter in a churn, but that smile, it was a knife in my heart.

"Anybody could've got through, sir," he whispers to me. "It wasn't anything."

It was not nothing. It was as brave as I'd ever seen, and I told him.

"But to shoot a brother," he whispers, "and get let off for it afterward… How many have done that?"

"That's a terrible story, my son," Inclito's mother told him. "Incanto will think we're beasts here."

"Some are." He sipped his wine. "There's beasts in every town."

"So there are. So there are." The old woman nodded, her face somber, and patted her hair with a hand so white and thin that I felt I could almost see through it. "I'm glad that you mentioned it, Inclito my son. I've been racking my brain for a story that you and Mora haven't heard over and over, and it reminded me of one."

She spoke to me. "This will be a story of the old time in Grandecitta. These young people think we lie when we talk about those days, but You, Incanto, you will know better. I was a year older than Mora and Fava are now, I think. Perhaps two, but no more than that. This you will disbelieve, too, just as they do. But I was quite good-looking then."

"You are good-looking now," I told her truthfully. "At your granddaughter's age you must have been ravishing."

THE MOTHER'S REMINISCENCE: FROM THE GRAVE

M
y son has told a story of a war we all remember. This is from an older one, a war under the Long Sun. I myself was scarcely more than a child when it happened.

I was scarcely more than a child, and yet I was courted in those days by two fine young men, Turco and Casco were their names. Turco was my favorite, and to this day I can't forget how we sat under the orange trees and spoke of love and the family we would make together. When I think back on it now, it seems to me that we must have sat and talked like that often. But it cannot be, because the trees I remember are always in bloom. The years were so much longer then!

War came. Casco was rich enough to ride a fine horse, so he became a cavalryman. He rode out to see me one last time before he went away to fight. It was about noon, I think, and I had been lying down in my room. I can hear his knock, even now, and our old servant grumbling to herself as she goes to answer it. I knew who it was without looking and got up and went out to speak to him. "I will come back to you," he told me, "and I tell you now that if your sneaking, lying Turco is with you, I will lay his body at your feet. You have been warned."

Casco was a strong, brave man, but he was wounded almost at once. He had only just ridden away to fight, that was how it seemed to me, when I got his first letter from the hospital. I do not remember now exactly all that first letter said, but all of his letters were very much alike. He worshipped me, he adored me, and if I so much as looked at any other man he would cut my nose off. And worse. I hope that neither of you girls ever receives letters like those. They are not pleasant, believe me.

As you would expect, he begged me again and again to come to see him in the hospital, and on my wedding day I did. He was unconscious and did not see me, however. You cannot imagine what a relief it was. I sought out the nurse who cared for him and asked if he would recover, and she said that he would not. What joy I felt!

Yet he did. The black wreath was still hanging on our door when he came stamping down the road in his big boots, with the end of his saber trailing in the dust. His cavalry uniform hung on him like the clothes of a scarecrow, yet he was polite when he saw the wreath and my black gown. "Your father?" he asked me.

"My husband," I told him, and he stared at me, dumbfounded.

I asked him, "Did you think yourself the only trooper to suffer, Casco? The patre united us not twenty beds from the one in which you lay, and after the ceremony they let me bring him here and nurse him myself."

How he glared! I thought he was about to fly at my throat.

"They needed the bed, you see, and they knew that my husband was going to die in spite of all that they or I could do. So they let us bring him here, and when the end came we buried him in our family plot, next to the orchard in which he and I used to sit, and not a day has passed on which I have not knelt weeping on his grave."

"Show me."

I shook my head. "If you want to see it and say a prayer for him, you may. But I won't go there with you."

Casco nodded and went through the house, and I returned to my room and locked the door. It was not until later that I learned what he had done.

He had been raging when he left me, but he was quiet when he returned, quiet and polite. I was watching from my window, and he seemed so weak and sick then that my heart went out to him. He loved me, after all, and that I did not wish to have the only kind of love he had to give was neither my fault nor his. Furthermore, he had gone out bravely to defend Grandecitta, and had suffered a terrible wound.

I went downstairs again and invited him to sit down, and offered to bring him a glass of wine and some fruit so that he might refresh himself before he returned to the city.

He thanked me and sat, and told me that he was feeling unwell, which I had seen for myself already. "A glass of wine, please." (I will never forget how pale he was under his beard, or the skull that grinned behind his face.) "A glass of any wine you have," he said, "and when I have drunk it I will trouble you no longer."

I did not believe him. I felt sure that as soon as he felt better he would pay court to me as before, and I steeled myself to refuse him. But I hurried away just the same, and filled the little glass that I had used until I was old enough to eat my dinner with Mama and Papa, and brought it back to him.

How long was I gone? I have wondered often. Half a minute, perhaps. Or a minute. Or two. No longer than that, I am sure. And yet it was long enough. He had fallen from his chair and lay dead on the floor. I dropped his wine and screamed, but it seemed a very long time before anyone came. I had gotten over the worst of my fear by then, and was on my knees picking up the pieces of broken glass and wiping up the spilled wine. It was while I was doing it that I noticed that his saber was missing. He was still wearing his sword belt and the empty scabbard.

Now I will tell you what our old servant, Schiamazza, revealed to me the next day. She had been afraid that Casco would dishonor my husband's grave, you see, and had followed him at a distance.

He had gone to the grave and stood staring down at it for a minute or two. The stone had not been erected then, and Schia mazza said he had not been certain then that it was in fact my husband's grave, in spite of the mountain of flowers I had left on it. He had looked all around him, searching everywhere with his eyes, and she was afraid he would see her, though she had hidden herself behind a tree some distance away. She thought that he was looking for another fresh grave. I myself think that he was making certain he was unobserved.

He drew his saber and knelt, and from the way he gripped the hilt she knew what he was about to do, but she did not dare cry out. Kneeling on the grave itself, on my poor Turco's chest as it were, he clasped the hilt in both hands and raised it over his head.

Schiamazza called it miracle, and perhaps it was. Perhaps it was not. You must be the judge of that.

Miracle or not, a tall man with a bird upon his shoulder stood beside Casco. Schiamazza had not seen where he came from. Nor did she see where he went when he left. Casco had raised his saber. Like a knife! And she had closed her eyes in horror. When she opened them again, the tall man was there. He was a witch, a strego, that seems certain. He spoke to Casco, and loudly enough that old Schiamazza overheard him. He said, "Only cowards strike at the dead-the dead cannot defend themselves."

Casco had lowered his saber and replied, too softly for her to hear.

"As you wish," said the strego. "Only remember that the dead can avenge themselves."

The strego's familiare spoke too. I have heard a good many talking birds, but all they say is nonsense. Schiamazza swore that this one spoke to Casco as one man to another, saying, "Beware! Beware!" It fluttered its wings, and it and the strego vanished together.

Casco raised his saber as before, held it up for a moment when he prayed or cursed, and plunged it to the hilt into the newly dug soil of my husband's grave. After that he rose and stamped and kicked poor Turco's flowers, she said, and seemed almost to dance upon his grave in his fury. It had frightened her so much that she fled.

Let me stop here for a moment or two. I see the questions in your eyes, Incanto. I will try to answer them. There was a wall around our orchard and burial plot, a stone wall about as high as that door, with two gates in it. The gate farther from the house was kept locked when it was not in use. Boys climbed the wall to steal fruit sometimes, however, so it may be that the strego climbed it, too. It is also possible that he had been in our house, and had followed Casco outside just as Schiamazza did. My father, my mother, or my brother may have been consulting him in secret. Who can say? For my own part, I think it likely that he flew into our orchard as the birds did, in a bird's shape or his own. In the Whorl, where we knew nothing of the inhumi, it was known that stregos can fly when they wish. You young people may mock me for saying it, but you have heard many such stories from me, and there is a grain of truth in every one of them. More than a grain, in many.

At first we thought that Casco's family would bury him, but his father and both his brothers had been killed in the same battle in which he had been wounded, and no one remained except a grandmother, an old woman such as I am now, much too foolish and confused for any business more serious than baking a pie. She gave my father money, I believe, and he made all the funeral arrangements. Casco's uniform no longer fit him, as I said, and so he was buried in a good velvet tunic that my brother had outgrown. For months afterward, I did not even know what had become of his clothes and the long saber that my brother had pulled from my husband's grave.

My first husband. That is what I meant to say. I have been married five times, Fava, though you would not think that anyone would have me to look at me now. It is still terribly hard for me to talk about these things, which would only bore you and Mora anyway. I will pass over them as quickly as I can tonight.

I married again the next summer. He was a wonderful man, handsome and kind. Autumn came, and he went hunting with two friends. It was the first time that we had been separated. He fell from his horse, they said, and when they picked him up he was dead.

For months I could not credit it. I used to awaken when the servant knocked and leave my bed, feeling quite certain that he would come back to me in a day or two. As I washed and dressed, his death would close in on me like a fist. It was horrible. Horrible!

Three years passed before I married again, a good man, quiet, hardworking, and studious. For me, he said, he was willing to dare the curse. By that time many were saying that there was a curse on me, you see. I was not yet twenty, and I had buried two husbands. The worst hinted that I had murdered them.

For seventeen months we lived together very happily. Then my father fell ill. He had workmen ditching a field he owned, a low swampy one that he thought might do to pasture cattle if it could be drained. Because he could not leave his bed and my brother was living in the city, he asked my husband to look at it for him and let him know how the work was going. His name was Solenno. My husband's name, I mean. My third husband. Gioioso had been my second husband.