Gene Wolfe - In Green's Jungles

The guard seemed not to hear anything we said, but leveled his long weapon at me. It was not a pike or spear, although it resembled both. "Are you a torturer?"

"What?"

"I said, are you a torturer? Are you in their guild?" He jerked his head to indicate something more distant than the cemetery that shingled the broad hillside behind him with stone.

I said no, not so much to deny it as because I did not understand him.

"The Matachin Tower?"

I shook my head and said that I had never heard of such a place.

"You've got that sword," he pointed to it, "and those clothes."

"I do, but I'm a stranger here."

Morello said, "The Duko's been stabbed." With an expressive gesture, he pointed out the wound.

"We've bandaged him, but he's lost too much blood."

The guard nodded; if he had understood, nothing in his face showed it.

"He needs a physician," Mora declared.

Sfido added, "Or captors with sense enough to let him die."

Morello protested, and Hide stepped between them.

Colonel Terzo blurted, "If our Duko dies, he dies too!," and shot the omophagist a look of venomous hatred.

Mora's eyes flashed. "You're not master here!"

"Tie my hands then, and carry Rigoglio yourself. I say that if Rigoglio dies, he dies!"

Eco growled. His hand was on the hilt.

"I'd sooner set him free," Mora told Terzo angrily, "than let you kill him. I'd sooner give him his knife back and let him kill you."

The guard shouted for silence, Oreb croaked, "No talk," and Jahlee giggled.

"Nobody's killing nobody." The guard turned his strange weapon on the omophagist. "Not unless I give the order."

"Well said," I told him.

"And you-where's your sword?"

I held out my hands. "I have none."

Rigoglio raised his big head as though it were almost too heavy for him to lift. "Our friend is a witch, a strego. As you see."

"That does it!" The guard beckoned to Jahlee. "Are you with them?"

"Do you want me to be?"

He stared at her as if unable to think of a reply, cursing in a monotonous whisper.

"No die!" Oreb was speaking to Rigoglio, and I bent to listen to him, realizing that Oreb had heard something I had not.

"Don't feel pity for me, Incanto." I could scarcely make out the words. "I don't mind anymore."

Sfido asked me, "Can't you breathe new life into him?"

I shook my head yet again. "I've tried. I thought you wanted him dead."

"I do. But I want him standing before a wall to have his brains blown out."

The guard was taking off his military cloak. He gave it to Jahlee. "You put this on. Put it on now."

"Red's a good, dramatic color, isn't it?" She threw it over her shoulders and spread it wide, one foot on tiptoe, the knee bent. "Can you make a mirror for me, Rajan?"

"Perhaps I could," I told her. "I won't."

"You don't have to. I see myself reflected in his eyes." She told the guard, "You can look. Go ahead. You can touch, too, if you're nice."

For a moment I had feared that Hide might shoot him. His voice shook me from my reverie instead. "Father?"

"Yes. What is it?"

Fog was rising from the marsh like the fog that had risen from the river as that other-whorlly evening grew chill. I thought of Nettle's seeing the ghosts rise from Lake Limna on the last summer that she and her parents had vacationed there.

"What were you thinking about, Father?"

"Fogs and mists. They are almost as insubstantial as shadows, Hide. Yet they can unite our experiences in bonds of iron."

Following my eyes, he too looked out over the marsh. A solitary bird flew there, and for a moment I supposed that it was Oreb; but it flew on, intent like me upon returning to its nest.

"There was white sea fog," I told Hide, "a much thicker fog than this, when Krait and I put out in the sloop to look for Seawrack."

"Who's that?"

"The singer that Colonel Terzo and I hear at times."

Hide was silent once more and so was I, remembering the caresses of two lips and a single hand.

At length. "Father, can I ask you an important question?"

"Of course."

"It's going to seem pretty foolish to you.

Probably it will. But it's important to me just the same."

"I understand, my son."

"When… Sometimes you act like my questions aren't very important."

I nodded. "Sometimes you question me out of mere curiosity, or when I'm deep in other thoughts. I have complaints to make of you, Hide, just as you have complaints to make of me. Perhaps we ought to be more tolerant of each other."

"I'll try. This is my question, Father. When you were my age, did you understand the whorl you lived in? The Long Sun Whorl?"

"When I was your age, Hide, I no longer lived there. Your mother and I had been married, your brother Sinew had been born, and we were here on Blue." Recollections of struggle and despair displaced the golden days. "We weren't living on the Lizard yet, but we were here."

Hide began to speak; I raised my hand. "To answer your question, when I was your age I understood neither the Long Sun Whorl nor this one in which I was then living. I still don't. I understand more than you, perhaps. Perhaps. But I don't understand everything. You believe that I'm trying to withhold knowledge from you."

"I know you are, Father." His tone was firm and a little angry.

"I've already told you a great deal. A great deal that you've paid scant attention to, and a great deal that you've rejected because it has not fallen in with your preconceptions."

Grudgingly, "Sometimes."

"As you say. When I was younger than you are now, Hide, and lived in the Whorl, my father tried to teach me a great deal about his shop and its affairs. He sold paper, quills, ink, pencils, account books, and the like. I know I've told you about that."

"Yes, Father."

"I shut my ears to it. I have often wished since that I had heard him with the greatest attention. He wanted me to operate his shop, you see, when he grew old. I was determined not to. At times when I felt I had your entire attention, I have tried to tell you what I have, in ways that I believed you might recall after many years."

"I'm listening, now, Father. Really I am."

I, too, was listening, in the same way that I stopped to listen again a minute or two ago. Mostly I was listening for any sound that might herald Oreb's return; but I heard only the snort and stamp of one of our horses, and the slow beating of wings wider and softer than Oreb's.

"Aren't you going to tell me anything?"

"Perhaps. Hide, there is one matter, one very important matter, upon which I cannot speak. In the past I've tried to turn the subject when you came too near to it, and I suppose I will again."

"You understand about the Vanished People. I know you do."

"I do not."

He ignored it. "It seems to me like they're the key. If I could just understand them, I'd understand everything, even that place we went to when you thought we were going to Green. Only it wasn't Green, was it?"

I shook my head.

"What was it?"

"Duko Rigoglio said it was the Short Sun Whorl, the whorl from which he had been taken by force long ago to be put aboard the Whorl. To be put into the Long Sun Whorl, I ought to say, perhaps."

"But it was way too long, Father. You said that yourself. Thousands and thousands of years."

I nodded. "So I did, and so it was. That is why I will not call it the Short Sun Whorl."

His next question surprised me. "Do you think they buried him in that big cemetery?"

"Rigoglio? No."

"They said they would."

"So they did."

The guard had locked the gate, saying he was doing us a favor. "I could take you up the short way, there's a break in the wall up there, and I know how to find it."

I remarked that the long road was often the shortest in the long run.