In Green's Jungles (8 page)

"What did you want with your brother?" the man of the Vanished People asked him.

And he said that he had hoped to bury the corpse and pray for the dead man's spirit.

"So I feared. I will not go with you into the sewer you are to clear for us. You must go alone, save for such men as he. Come."

They went on, and saw more corpses floating in the quiet water; and as they walked the city closed itself above the river until the strip of daylight that shone upon the dark water was no wider than the man's hand. "This must be a terrible place at night," he said.

"This is always a terrible place now," the man of the Vanished People told him, "and you are going into a place where it is always night."

As if the voice of the man of the Vanished People had somehow revealed them, the man with the black sword saw eyes, green eyes and xtdlow, that studied him unblinking from the shadows and from the water.

At the point at which the strip of daylight vanished altogether, there was an altar of bronze and stone. The image behind it was so worn and battered that the man with the black sword could not tell whether it had originally taken the form of a man or a woman, of a beast, a star, or some other thing.

"This was our g(ddess of purity," the man of the Vanished People told him.

"Would it help me to pray to her?"

The man of a.-, Vanished People shook his head.

"I will pray to her just the same," the min with the black sword decided. He knelt and said many things, most of them very foolish, talking to the Vanished Goddess of purity about his task, his sons, his wife, and his home across the abyss.

When he rose again, the man of the Vanished People had vanished, but a light gleamed on the Vanished Goddess's cold altar. The man with the black sword reached out to touch it; he could not feel it, yet the pressure of his fingers moved it as if it were a pebble or a stick. He closed his hand around it, and all was dark; but when he opened his hand the light shone as before. When he turned toward the water, the green and yellow eyes that had gleamed from it sank beneath it, and when he turned toward the land, the green and yellow eyes that had watched him so hungrily winked out.

How much farther he walked after that, I cannot say. He was tired already and stopped often to rest, the way was hard, and each time he took a hundred strides it seemed to him that he had traveled very far.

At last he came upon a naked old man who was gnawing on a human foot. The old man looked up at the sound of his approach, and the man with the black sword saw that he was blind, his eyes as white and blank as boiled eggs. "Get back!" this old blind man shouted, and he snatched up a rusty knife and flourished it.

"I must go past you," the man with the black sword told him, "but I will not harm you."

At the sound of his voice, the blind man stopped slashing the air with his knife. "You, you're alive," he said. And he groped for the man with the black sword, although he was well out of reach.

"I am," the man with the black sword said. "Are you afraid that I'm an inhumi? I'm not."

"Same thing happened to me," the blind man told him. "Lost every drop of blood. They thought I was dead and threw me down here."

"Was that long ago?" the man with the black sword asked, and the blind man replied, "I think so."

He no longer knew his name, or the name of the city that had sent him and his companions to Green, only that he had believed someone who had told him that they must go, and that they had fallen into the hands of the inhumi as soon as their lander set down. The man with the black sword ordered him to stand, and when he stood tried to make him straighten up, because he wanted to see how tall he was; but he was no longer able to stand straight.

"I can't help wondering whether you are Auk," the man with the black sword told him. "Auk, a man I used to know, murdered another man called Galada. I never saw Galada but he was very much like you, except that he was not blind."

"I'm not blind," the blind man protested.

"The gods do such things. Does the name Auk mean anything to you?"

"No." The blind man seemed to think for a time.

"Chenille. Do you recognize that name?"

"Chenille?" The blind man turned it over and over in his mouth, muttering, "Chenille. Chenille." At last he said, "No."

The man with the black sword explained his task.

"I can show you," the blind man told him eagerly, and shuffled ahead of him. "It's bad. Very bad." He cackled to himself, and the man with the black sword recalled the mad laughter of certain animals he had known in a similar place. ones." Abruptly he halted. "You want to get at the good ones, "Bad," the blind man repeated. "You can't get at the good don't you? The nice fresh ones?"

The man with the black sword held the light he had been given so that it shone on the blind man's face then, hoping to read its expression; but it had been gnawed by cancer and evil, and was so hideous that he closed his fist around the light at once.

The bodies of men and women and children filled the waterway to the top, which was much higher than a tall man could have reached. Some were swollen with decay, others rotted almost to skeletons. "They drain them and I take them," the blind man muttered, "but there's no life in them."

The man with the black sword swung it at the leg of a dead woman, and the black blade severed it cleanly at the knee; leg and foot fell at his feet, and he kicked them into the water. To the blind man he said, "They dropped you into this sewer thinking you were dead. I understand that, but why did you remain here?"

The blind man did not reply, pushing past him to finger the clogged corpses, his rusty knife waving like the feeler of some sightless, boneless water creature.

"Take what you want and go," the man with the black sword told him. "I have work to do."

"I want to be here when it happens," the blind man said. "I want to see it."

The man with the black sword made him stand back while he hewed at the corpses, finding that his sword would split the pelvis of a grown man as an axe splits kindling, chopping and slashing until his arm dripped with the reeking fluids of dissolution. At last, when it seemed to him that he had cut to bits at least a hundred corpses, the water that had only seeped and sweated began to trickle and spurt. It was not clean water, yet it seemed clean to him; and laying aside his sword and the light he had been given, he washed his hands in it, and bathed his face.

"It's what's past," the blind man said. "You see that, don't you? It's the past holding on."

"More water's getting through now," the man told him as he took up his black sword again. "A little more water, anyway."

"Water always does."

"This is new water-better water, I think." The man with the black sword picked up his light, which seemed to weigh nothing.

The point of his sword pried free a faceless, battered corpse; it fell upon the walkway on which they stood, and he pushed it into the river with his foot. "I believe that I understand what you mean. It may be that I understand it even better than you do. In the past, this whorl we call Green has belonged to the inhumi. These people came here and supplied them with human blood. That must change." He slashed again and again, laying open the rib cages of his human dead, splitting their skulls and severing their limbs. "The future must be set free here."

As he finished speaking, he felt the blind man's fingers on his back, and knew what they portended. He spun around as the rusty blade drove toward him. He tried to counter it with his black sword, and was struck from behind as the tangled dead gave way at last.

Very far he was carried by the boiling surge, and nearly drowned. When he was able to gain the riverbank, it was a bank lined with trees so immense as to defy description, trees to dwarf towers, whose mammoth limbs and innumerable, whispering leaves hid the towers of the City of the Inhumi from his sight, and whose topmost leaves were among the stars.

"That was no story to tell at table, Incanto," Inclito's mother informed me. "I could scarcely eat a mouthful." She cut a piece from her slice of veal with unnecessary violence, then cut that into two smaller pieces.

I apologized very sincerely.

"Was it just a story?" Mora demanded. "Do you just make it up?"

I was hungry, and until then I had been unable even to taste the food Inclito had heaped onto my plate. I shrugged and began to eat.

"No one said that all the stories tonight had to be true," his mother told her granddaughter. "It was just that your friend Fava began with a true one."

Fava herself smiled charmingly. "All stories are false, and none are falser than those that are supposed to be true. The lie adds a second lair of falsity."

Mora turned to look at her. "Even yours?"

"Even mine, though I made mine as true as I could. The question somebody ought to ask is why Incanto chose to tell that particular story tonight." Fava raised a fragment of boiled potato to her mouth and put it down again. "I'll ask, if no one else does. But it would be better if your father did it."

Inclito grunted, chewed, and swallowed. "What about yours, Fava? Why'd you tell us about that poor sprat you found in the mountain stream?"

"Because it was the best that I could think of just then," Fava told him, "and I was first and had to think quickly. Your strego had plenty of time in which to think, and he's much too clever to tell that story merely to win the game."

Inclito's mother said severely, "It's very impolite of you to call Incanto a strego, Fava, when he's denied it. He is our guest."

Mora said, "If Papa won't ask, I will. Why did you tell us that story, Incanto?"

I sipped my wine as I considered my answer. "All the stories tonight have been about duty, or that was how it seemed to me. You were miserable in your palaestra, and Fava thought it her duty to help you, as she did. In her own story, she thought it her duty to rescue the child from his mother, and to look for him when he disappeared."

Inclito nodded. "Mano did his duty, and he was a man who would murder his own brother. There's something I want to ask Fava about that story of hers, though. The boy, Fava. What was it you called him? Bricco. At the end you said he'd never come back to his family?"

Fava nodded.

"But those other sprats, the ones he used to play with, they saw him every so often. They said the Vanished People had stolen him?"

Fava nodded again.

"Well, when they saw him, did the Vanished People bring him back?"

She laughed-a good, merry laugh that left me feeling entirely certain that she was more mature than she appeared. "I should have asked them that. I don't know. Perhaps he escaped from them every now and then, and tried to return to his family and his old life."

"But he couldn't," I remarked. By that time I felt certain I had been right about her.

Inclito pursued the topic. "There was one of them with the man in Incanto's story. This Bricco sounds like one himself, like he had joined them, almost."

Fava nodded. "That was why the other children associated him with them, I feel sure."

Mora said, "There aren't any, are there, Papa? That's what you always say."

"There are stories." He helped himself to more veal. "We heard one tonight."

"There are the old houses," Mora said. "Not like ours, but old houses of theirs that nobody wants." Her slow speech may have given her words more weight than she intended. "People see those, and at night they see travelers camping in them, and they imagine there's a town full of them that we can't find."

"Incanto believes in them," her father declared. "What do you know about them, Incanto?"

His mother reached across him to prod my arm. "Do eat something. Why, you've hardly touched your food."

To satisfy her I swallowed another bite. "I've been fasting up until this meal. What I've eaten already is more than enough for me."

"You didn't talk about my story." It was her accusatory tone again. "You said all the stories had been about duty. Mine was about ghosts and witchcraft."

"In that case I was mistaken. I apologize, humbly and contritely."

Mora asked, "Do you believe in witchcraft, Incanto? In stregas and stregos, like my grandmother? In ghosts?"

"I believe in ghosts." I recalled Hyacinth's ghost and its effect upon Pig very vividly, but I chose not to mention that memory. "The best man I've ever known told me once, long ago, that he had seen one, the ghost of an elderly man with whom he had lived and whom he had assisted. He wouldn't have lied to me-or to anybody, if he could help it-and he was a careful observer."

I spoke to Inclito's mother. "It was Turco's ghost who did his duty, or that was how it seemed to me. Turco felt that it was his duty as your husband to protect you from Casco, and from two men whom he feared were like Casco, or might become like him. You didn't see that in either of them?"

She shook her head, and I said, "The dead must look at people differently."

Inclito nodded. "I think so too. Men and women, it's the same. A girl is crazy about some man. Her mother likes him too, but she won't say so. Her father knows he's a loafer and a thief. I see it all the time."

Mora told me, "You haven't answered Papa's question about the Vanished People yet, and you haven't said anything about witches. If you believe in ghosts, you have to believe in witches, too."

"I believe that there are people who are called witches by others," I said. "Some of them may find it to their advantage to help the belief in witchcraft along."

Mora said, "Then you believe in witches but not in witchcraft," and Fava tittered.

"You may put it like that if you want. I think it's fair. May I ask you a question about your story, Mora? You said that the giant's daughter did badly in her lessons, I believe-or at least you seemed to imply it. Did she do badly in all her subjects? Or only in some."

"The story's over now," Mora declared.

Fava put in, "I know a girl who gets the answer before the teacher does."

"In arithmetic? I thought so. There are people who do not know all the good qualities they possess. Mora is one, I believe."