Gene Wolfe - In Green's Jungles

To understand, you must visualize its sky and hold the vision above you. Not my words. Not my words. Not the smears of ink upon this paper. The sky, a sky purple or blue-black rather than blue, a sky whose skylands were always as visible as those at home, though vastly more remote and colder. It was warm there in the deserted, ruined street; but the dark sky made it seem cold, and I felt sure that it would be cold soon, would turn cold, in fact, before the actual setting of the crimson sun.

"How did we get here?" Hide demanded.

And Mora, "Where are we, Incanto?"

I shook my head and kept my silence.

Inclito's coachman snapped, "Don't do that!" and I turned to see to whom he was speaking. It was to Jahlee, and she was taking off her clothing. "Look!" she exclaimed. "Look at me!" The last worn garment dropped around her feet. She pirouetted, displaying hemispherical breasts, a slender waist, and narrow hips.

Mora muttered, "Is there some madness here?"

"Yes." It was Duko Rigoglio. As he spoke, he fell upon his knees before me. "Free my hands. That's all I ask, free my hands, please, as you love the Increate."

It was a new term to me. I could only peer into his eyes and try to guess what he meant by it.

"I'm a proud man. You know that. I'm begging now. Have I begged you for my life?"

"Your Grandeur-" Morello began.

"I'm begging, Incanto. This is more than life to me. Whoever you are, whatever you are, have pity on me!"

I motioned to Hide. "Cut his bonds."

Sfido exclaimed, "No!"

"Are you afraid he may escape, and remain here?" I asked him. Without waiting for an answer, I told Hide, "Free him, and the others, too. For their sake, I hope they do."

Hide tore his eyes from Jahlee, drew a knife smaller than Sinew's, and cut the cords that had held Rigoglio's hands behind him; Rigoglio rubbed his wrists, muttering thanks.

"You know this street," I told him. "You recognized it at once. You're a proud man, just as you say-too proud to enjoy feeling gratitude for anything. Share your knowledge with me, and I will acknowledge that you have settled any debt."

"I can't be sure," he said, and stared about him with wide eyes. After a moment, a trickle of blood ran from his mouth, so that I wondered if it were possible that he was an inhumu, and had deceived me; but he had merely bitten his lip.

"It's so quiet here," Mora said. Her hand was on the hilt of her sword.

Eco had a needier, and was studying each empty, staring window in turn. I told him, "I believe you're right, someone is watching us," and he nodded without speaking.

Jahlee ran long-fingered hands down her slender body. "This is your doing, Raj an, it has to be. Do you like it? I do!"

I shook my head. "You must praise-or blame – Duko Rigoglio. There is a city somewhat like this on Green, but we are not on Green; these houses would be the towers of the Neighbor lords there. Where are we, Your Grandeur?"

"We've come home… To Nessus."

Mora said, "You can't have lived here. Nobody alive now can. Just look at them."

He started to speak, but stopped.

"Big place!" Oreb dropped onto a pile of rubble, looking as he had on Green-a dwarfish man in feathers. Until that moment I had not been aware that he had come with us, far less that he had left us to scout.

"You asked us to free your hands," I told Rigoglio. "They are free. What do you intend to do with them?"

He indicated the house before which we stood. "I would like to search it. May I?"

"For weapons?" Sfido inquired. "I doubt that you'll find a stick."

"For something…" Rigoglio turned to me. "They forced me to board the Whorl and put me to sleep. I told you."

"Poor man!" Oreb studied him through one bright, black eye.

"If I could find something more, something I recognized…

I asked whether he did not recognize the house.

He pointed to the roof. "There were arches up there, and statues under the arches… I-I'm sure of it. They…" He wandered toward the house, bent, and rooted in the rubble banked against its wall.

"I was trapped in a pit in a ruined city of the Vanished People once," I remarked to Mora. "Have I ever told you about that?"

She shook her head.

"I've been thinking about it, and about the City of the Inhumi on Green. Those were ruins left by the Neighbors' ancient race; these were left by ours, I believe-we are as ancient as they, or nearly. How long have these been empty, do you think?"

She shrugged. Eco said, "A hundred years, perhaps."

"Longer than that, I believe."

I went over to watch Rigoglio, and in a moment more found Jahlee clinging to me like the lianas, her body warm and damp with perspiration (as those of inhumi never are), and fragrant with some heavy, cloying scent. Long sorrel hair that proceeded from no wig draped us both like the vines of Silk's arbor.

When I tried to free myself from her, she grinned at me. "I've got teeth here. Real teeth, Rajan. Adieu to my famous tight-lipped smile! Look what I can do now." She grinned again, more broadly than ever.

I suggested that she do it to someone else.

"Your son? He was flirting with me before we came into your bedroom. He isn't very good at it yet-"

Rigoglio straightened up, holding up a broken stone hand about half the size of mine. "Statues," he said. "Up there, underneath the arches. I told you."

"So you did. Statues of whom?"

"I don't-the eponyms."

"And who are they?"

He shook his head. "May I search the house?"

I nodded, then hurried after him. Seeing me run, Sfido shouted, "Stop him!" But I was not afraid that Rigoglio would escape, and in fact I would have welcomed it if it could have been arranged without my culpability. As soon as he left me, I knew that he was going into danger.

Nor was I wrong. Ducking under the lintel, I heard him fall, and his muffled cry. In what must once have been the solaria, he was struggling with a skeletal, nearly naked assailant. I saw the dull gleam of steel and snatched at the filthy wrist as the knife came up.

My fingertips only brushed it.

Rigoglio's gasp as the knife went home was followed at once by the boom of a slug gun, close and deafeningly loud. The skeletal attacker stiffened and shrieked, empty hands raised before his filthy, bearded face.

"Don't shoot him," I told Hide, and was seconded at once by Oreb, who was flying in tight circles above our heads: "No shoot! No shoot! No shoot!"

Looking up at him, I thought for a moment that it was a painted ceiling I saw beyond him; but it was the sky, a clear, star-spotted sky so dark that it seemed practically black; the roof and upper floor of the house had fallen in, leaving only its walls standing.

"I missed him?" Hide sounded disgusted with himself.

"Don'. Don'." Hesitantly, Rigoglio's attacker was getting his feet.

"Man run," Oreb warned us.

"You're right," I told him. "He will run, and Hide will shoot and kill him, and we will have lost him." I caught him by the arm as I spoke.

We tied his hands behind him with what remained of the cords that had bound Rigoglio, Morello, and Terzo, and contrived a hobble for his ankles that allowed him to take small steps. He seemed to have lost the power of speech almost entirely-it is no exaggeration to say that Oreb could talk better-and was so clearly mad that I was very happy indeed that Hide had not killed him. I had seen the tunnel gods that Urus and his fellow convicts had called bufes, and had killed several of them before Mamelta and I were apprehended; this new prisoner of ours recalled them so vividly that when I was not looking directly at him, or was preoccupied with my own thoughts, it seemed to me that we were accompanied by one, starved, vicious, and desperate.

Rigoglio was badly wounded, as we found when we had ripped his shirt away. We bandaged him as well as we could with strips torn from it, and I promised that we would let Morello and Terzo carry him as soon as we found materials from which to contrive a stretcher.