Gene Wolfe: In Green's Jungles

"You would not, if you had seen and heard it. Her terrible scream ringing over this silent, desolate marsh. The hideous, misshapen thing writhing and bleeding at your feet that just a moment before had appeared to be a lovely woman. Try to imagine all that. Can you?"

He said nothing.

"You would have battered her head with the butt of your slug gun then, trying to end her agony. Her wig would have fallen from her head, and her eyes-her eyes, Hide-would roll up to you while she begged for her life, saying please, oh, please, Hide. Mercy for your mother's sake. Mercy! We were friends, I would have lain with you in the Bear Tower if only you had come to me. You know it's true! Spare my life, Hide!"

"No talk!" Oreb commanded.

I spoke again anyway. "You would have struck all the harder, smashing her toothless, blood-drinking mouth with the butt of your slug gun; but you would never be able to forget those eyes, which would return to stare at you-and at me, as well-in the small hours of many nights. When you were as old as I am, you would still see her eyes."

Reluctantly, he nodded.

"And a hundred years from now, every inhumi in the whorl would be a little harder, a little more cruel and proud, because of what we did here tonight. Remember-what we are, they must become."

"All right."

"When the war in Gaon was just about over, I freed my inhumi from their service – Jahlee among them. Why do you think I did that?"

He shrugged uncomfortably. "You didn't need them anymore."

"I could have found a great many uses for them. Believe me, I thought of many. I could have conquered the towns downriver and founded an empire. I could have used them to consolidate my hold on Han, and to tighten my grip upon Gaon. Nettle sent you and your twin to look for me, not so long ago?"

Hide nodded.

"I could have sent my inhumi to fetch all three of you to Gaon, where we would have become the ruling family, the sort of thing that Inclito's family is clearly becoming in Blanko; and when I died, you and your brother would have fought to the death for my throne.

"I rejected those possibilities and surrendered the throne the people of Gaon had given me instead, in part because I know what happened to the Neighbors, or believe I do-because I know that their towers still stretch to the damp skies of Green, when their cities here have crumbled into nameless hills."

I waited for him to speak; he only stared at me, open mouthed but wordless.

"On Green, the Vanished People had done what I had done in Gaon, Hide. They had made the inhumi serve them; and as time passed they had become more and more dependent upon their servants, servants whom they permitted to come here to feed, and perhaps carried here to feed. I myself had allowed my own inhumi to feed upon the blood of the people of Han, you see. It was war, I told myself, and the Man of Han would surely have done the same to us; but I had set my foot upon that path, and I was determined to leave it."

"What happened when all the Vanished People here were dead?" Hide asked in a strangled voice.

"I'm not sure it ever occurred," I told him. "A very few may have survived; a very few may survive here still. But a time came-I doubt that it was more than a few hundred years in coming-when it was no longer worthwhile for the inhumi to come here."

"What happened then?"

"I think you know," I told him, and wished him a good night.

So much has happened since I last wrote that I feel I should begin another book – or end this one. Perhaps I will do both tonight; that would be fitting.

For a long time I sat beside our little fire, writing and watching the stars rise above the scrub-covered hills through which Hide and I had ridden that day. Jahlee had never really gone, I knew. Oreb had testified to that, and testified to it still, although I cautioned him again and again to keep his voice down lest he wake Hide. Our horses had testified to it as well – the inhumi always frighten horses, I believe; perhaps they smell the blood.

I needed no more proof, but I soon had it. The cold winter wind seemed to carry with it a steaming, fetid wind from Green, as a frigid old man, penurious and hoary with age, might bear in his arms the rotten corpse of a beautiful young woman. My eyes were on my paper, squinting and straining to see each letter I shaped there, for it is no easy business to write by firelight. And it seemed to me that to my left, at or beyond the very edge of vision, a great man-killer of Green stalked, each slow and careful stride that crushed the too-thin ice devouring twenty cubits. When I looked beyond the fire, its light revealed wide, dripping leaves in silhouette; and once a moth with wings wider than the sheets on which I wrote, opalescent wings stamped by some god with a strange device of cross and circle, fluttered toward the flames-only to vanish when I blinked.

Jahlee was waiting for me the moment my eyes closed, more beautiful in her embroidered gown than she had ever been when she went naked in the Red Sun Whorl. "This steaming heat becomes you," I told her. "You were made for Green."

She pretended to pout. "I thought this was going to be a great surprise to you, if it happened at all. You expected it all along."

"My son should have joined you here some time ago. He fell asleep long before I finished writing."

She nodded, her face expressive of nothing.

"Did you seduce him? He would have had more than enough time to resume his clothing and go, I imagine."

"That's none of your business!"

"You did not, or you would boast of it."

"I said it's none of your affair. Hasn't it struck you that he may not have wanted to see you? I told him you'd be along."

"Of course. Particularly if you bit him on the neck at climax, as you bit the neck of the trooper who took us to the fort over the ditch."

"I didn't!"

"You didn't bite Hide because you were unable to seduce him. That's what you must mean, since-"

"Boy come!" Oreb sailed overhead, again three times his normal size, and absurdly resembling a feathered dwarf with overlong arms.

"If we continue this fight," I told Jahlee, "Hide and I will drive you away, just as we drove you away from our fire beside the frozen marsh. This is Green, and you are a human being here. Remember Rigoglio? The spittle running from his mouth? The empty eyes?"

She did. I saw her shudder.

"I won't pretend to value your life more highly than you do yourself, but I value it. Let us be friends-"

I had wanted to say, Let us be friends again, as we were in Gaon, and in the farmhouse by the battlefield; but she was weeping in my arms, and there seemed no point in continuing.

Hide found us like that, and was well-mannered enough to wait until we separated before speaking. "I found some people, Father. She and I didn't want to talk anymore, so I said I was going to have a look around, and told her to wait here for you."

"I'm not your servant, little boy." Jahlee wiped her nose on her sleeve. "I wanted no more of your company. Your father's twice the man you are."

"I know. Do you want to see them, Father?"

"Yes. Your brother will be among them, I think."

"You don't look very much like-like you used to," Hide blurted. "Not even as much as you did in that other place, with the big river."

I said nothing.

"Me and Oreb will show you, if you want us to."

Half a league brought us out of the jungle and into cleared land where a raised path let us walk with dry feet between wide, flooded fields of rice. The Short Sun glowed behind us like a disk of white-hot iron, sending our shadows, dark ambassadors inhumanly tall, before us. My staff had not come with me; so I made one like it for myself as we walked, watching with amusement as well as interest how its shadow, wan at first, grew thick and black as the staff acquired weight, solidity, and reality.