Gene Wolfe - In Green's Jungles

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 hands- mine, 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 different 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, supported 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 good-natured 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 pray-that 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.