In Green's Jungles (The Book of the Short Sun #2)

In Green's Jungles (The Book of the Short Sun #2) Page 14

So they went and got the wise man they needed, a real tall man. His beard is white like new snow, he's only got one eye and it's the color of deep water. He's still there when the mercenary comes, and this is the man that hires him when he gets to that big town down south. Before, another man that was working for this wise man had talked to them and put them on a boat that took them there.

This is a real good man, the mercenary says. Soon as he talks to him he knows he can trust him. He's living in a house the town gave him, a big one with floors up above each other, maybe three or maybe four. I remember houses like that in Grandecitta and so does Mama, she lived in one like that a long time ago. But this mercenary was born here. He never seen a house with more than two before. He's younger than I am, younger than anybody here but Mora and Fava.

This big house is full of carpets and all kinds of furniture and pictures, the kind of things Duko Rigoglio has in his house. But when he talks to them, this wise man, the mercenary knows none of it means anything to him. He has silk clothes and jewels, and gold cloth around his head, but they don't mean anything to him. Walking on carpet or grass is all the same to him. After he has talked to all of them a little, he asks each one what he wants the cards he's going to pay them for. This mercenary says he got to know the others on the boat, and there are some real good liars there, but when they try to lie to the wise man they only say, "I-I-I... "

Like that.

Some want the money for good things and some for bad. He talks to all of them, no matter what they want his money for.

This mercenary I talked to, he wants to buy a little piece of good land. All the good land where he was born, somebody owns already. So he wants to get hold of some cards and buy enough that he can build him a little house and get married. He's got a girl back there he hopes will wait for him.

When this wise man is through talking to them he hires them all, and this mercenary goes away to fight for him. Pretty soon they win, and he goes to the enemy town to hold it. The wise man, he sends his own people back to their farms and uses his mercenaries for that. Then he's gone, and nobody knows what happened to him. They got this young general, he loves him like his father, and he searches everyplace. He thinks somebody killed him and hid the body.

Then somebody in the enemy town where the mercenary is sees the wise man's wife. He tells the officer taking care of things there, and this mercenary is one of the ones they send to bring her in. They ask lots of questions, and he gets to hear some of it.

She and the wise man are going to go away and never come back, she says. They get a boat and go down a river that they got down there. Not our river. There's inhumi after him that want to kill him, and his wife is real scared. He tells her not to worry, they only want him, not her. They stop on a island and cook and eat, and there's inhumi all over. Then they get back in their boat and go to sleep. The wise man has this pet bird-

Oreb interrupted Inclito's story here, exclaiming, "Good bird!"

It talks, and the wise man says it will wake them up if the inhumi get too close. She's very scared, but he holds her and after a while she gets to sleep.

When she wakes up, it's still night. This wise man is gone, and the inhumi too. The boat's still tied to a tree or something on the little island, but she sees him over on the bank. He's taken off the head cloth he used to wear, and she sees his white hair shining in the dark. He's going away, and pretty soon she can't see him anymore, so next day she takes their boat and sails it back up the river to the enemy town and sells it.

This mercenary I talked to is one of the men that took her from the enemy town to the big town where this wise man was so the young general can talk to her. But when he gets her there, the young general pays him off and lets him go because they're cutting back now. That's when he comes here. So this is the end of his story, or anyhow it's the end for right now.

Mora gave her father a quizzical look. "Why did the wise man want to go away when they had won the war?"

Inclito's big shoulders rose and fell. "Somebody like Incanto could tell you, maybe. I'm just a farmer. You want to know about pigs and cows, ask me."

"Incanto?"

I shook my head, and Inclito sighed. "All right, I asked the mercenary the same thing, why did he go? He didn't know either. Then I asked about the big town that hired them, and he said things were good there. I said, they don't fight each other anymore? Or steal? And he said no, it was a nice town with honest people, only big. As big as a city inside the Long Sun Whorl is what he said, but how would he know? As big as Grandecitta? I don't believe it!"

Inclito turned to me. "My whole family has told, Mama and Mora, and now me. There's only you and Fava."

I said I would prefer that Fava precede me, and his mother thrust a platter of fresh pork at me. "You haven't eaten anything tonight, you or Fava. How about some bread? Decina baked this morning, and it's our own butter."

I took meat and a slice of bread to satisfy her.

"I'm leaving tomorrow morning, " Fava told Inclito's mother. "Mora knows, and so does Incanto now. I'd like to tell a long story tonight, since I won't be doing this anymore, and I want to make up a specially good one. Anyway, Incanto got to go last when he was here before."

She turned to me. "May I go last this time, Incanto? And will you tell us another one about Green? I'm going to lay mine there too, I think."

Chapter 8

My Second Story The Man Who Returned

On Green, at the time of which I speak, there was a band of a hundred bad men. A few had slug guns and almost all had knives. With these weapons they fought off the inhumi, and fought among themselves as well, only too often.

Their leaders were a certain man and his son, and though they thought themselves better than the rest, they were much worse because they hated each other. The others did not hate one another, though they fought and sometimes killed one another. It was only that they were proud and reckless, and that each one wanted to be thought very brave.

If they had been wise, they would have tried to recover the lander in which they had come to Green, but they were foolish, and because they feared the inhumi and did not know where in the City of the Inhumi it was, they would not. They felt sure there were other men on Green, and women, too; they wanted very much to find women.

Their leader, the man I spoke of, tried to persuade them to retake the lander; but when they refused, he foolishly agreed to lead them in search of colonists from the Long Sun Whorl. He led them north through the heat and the terrible jungle, feeling that the landers would have chosen a more temperate climate for the colonists they carried.

They traveled a long way, or at least they thought it long, and found a small settlement; but the settlers drove them away, then fled when they returned and attacked. Far though they traveled, it was never far enough to escape the jungle, its fevers, and its insects.

At last their leader gathered his men about him and told them frankly that their only hope was to reclaim the lander in which they had arrived. "If you will not come with me, " he told them, "I will go back alone and take it by stealth, if I can, or die trying. If we continue as we have begun, I will die in any case. I promised the people of my town that I would do my utmost to return to the Whorl. If I am to die here, I prefer to die with honor." They talked long after he spoke to them, eight or ten in support of him and a dozen or a score opposing him. Their wrangling continued for hours...

Here I stopped to listen, for I heard Hyacinth singing to her waves. "What is it?" my host's mother asked me.

"A woman singing in the sea on the other side of the whorl, " I told her. "I doubt that you can hear her, but I do."

While they wrangled in that fashion, I counted them over and over, and the result was always the same, one that I had come to know well since Ushujaa died: sixty-nine. At last even they grew tired and slept, agreeing to settle the matter by a vote in the morning.

As I lay sweating in the darkness, I foresaw what morning would bring. It was neither delusion nor enlightenment from any god; I knew them well by then, how foolish they were and how quick to anger. They would vote, and the sides would be very nearly even, though they could not be precisely even. The winners would demand that the losing side do everything they wished. The losers would defy them, and the sides would fight.

I rose as quietly as I could. We always had a fire, and two sentries; but the sentries, though they were awake, were as tired as the rest, and they had let the fire sink to embers. I crept away unobserved, not using the light that the Neighbor had given me until I was completely certain it could not be seen from the camp.

The next day, and the next, I made my way back toward the City of the Inhumi. It will seem vainglorious when I say that I lived by eating the creatures that attacked me, yet it was so. Their flesh was foul, for they were predators and carrion eaters; but I lived upon it and upon half-eaten fruits and nuts dropped by the great green spiders.

On the third day, Sinew joined me. Three more came on the morning of the forth, and six after night had fallen-six who had found us by my light, which shone a long way through the jungle, thick though it was. Then more and more, until we were forty-six men.

Forty-six we regained the City. I am proud of that, as proud as Patera Remora was of having brought Maytera Mint to confer with the Ayuntamiento. We had lost more than half our force since we set out; but we had learned a great deal in the losing of it, and I had brought these back without losing even one more.

"Poor Silk, " Oreb muttered on my shoulder. And again, "Poor Silk."

"My name is not Silk, " I explained to the people seated beyond the clear white glow of my light. "It has never been Silk. He once belonged to a man called Silk, and uses that name for me now."

The white light died in my hand as I spoke. A big man with a kind, ugly face that made me want to smile said, "Was this you for real, Incanto? Were you on Green? By Echidna's babies, I think you were!"

I shook my head and told him it had been someone else, a man whose name I have forgotten, a man who wore a ring with a white stone. My own name is Horn, no matter what Oreb may say.

They stole into the City of the Inhumi by night, moving through the sewers at first, then through the cellars and the lower floors of the ruinous towers, the way having been scouted for them by their leader's son. Eventually, however, they were forced to go out into the neglected, rubbish-strewn streets, in which the inhumi take the shapes of men and women to act out their ghastly parody of human life.

An hour passed, and another; they had to fight, and fight they did, cunning as felwolves and fierce as Mucor's lynxes. Onward and onward until they found the place where their lander had put down. It was not there, and when they saw that it was not, the heart went out of them.

Two had been lost in the advance. Their leader tried to count those who died in their retreat as well, but they fell too fast. At last they reached the sewers again, and the fighting slackened. He counted them then, and counted twenty-seven with his son and himself; but as they made their way along a narrow, slimy walkway above the water he tried to name them and found he could name only twenty-six. Other names occurred to him, the names of dead men and of certain men who had not rejoined him in the jungle. He knew that the twenty-seventh man could be none of those.

He had feared that the human slaves of the inhumi would be waiting for them where the sewer left the city, and so it proved. There was a hot fight there, in which he was wounded. His son carried him back into the darkness under the City; and when his son had returned to the fighting, and he felt a trifle stronger, he sat up and watched the battle as one who sits at ease in a darkened theater watches the play, his men crouching and firing, or wriggling and creeping near enough to use their knives. Among them fought a young man whom he had never seen before, a young man with a needier who fought as bravely as the bravest.

Night came, and they got away. Wounded, he was no longer their leader; but they carried him with them, and he loved them and wept. The young man with the needier was wounded too, with many others; but when their wounds had begun to heal, his (which he would allow no one to treat) grew worse each day. He had been on another lander, he said, and had been hiding in the City of the Inhumi until they came.

The slaves of the inhumi pursued them, armed men and women in chains, with empty eyes; and when he could no longer walk, the men who had fought beside him left him beneath arching gray roots, where he lay as if in the Grand Manteion  -  and the man who had been leader lay there beside him.

"This is too hard for you, Incanto, " my host's mother said kindly. "You don't have to go on with it if you don't want to."

"It would be worse not to finish it, " I told her, "but I'll make the rest as brief as I can. I've talked too much already."

The young man lay on the ground, upon the naked black soil of Green, for little can grow between the monstrous trees. The man who had been leader lay beside him, and it seemed to him that the trees and vines leaned toward them to overhear their talk, and wept. I will not tell you how tall those trees are, or their thickness through the trunk; you would not credit anything I said. But I will say this. The trees you have seen are bushes, and the roots of many of the great trees on Green could heave the soil of this big farm from one end to the other and from one side to the other, making hills and valleys of its flat land. There are animals that burrow in the bark of those trees that are larger than we.

"You don't recognize me, " the dying man said. "I knew you wouldn't."

The man who had been leader shook his head.

"I promised I wouldn't deceive you as long as we were on your boat, " the young man told him, "but we are no longer on your boat. I am your son Krait." Krait was an inhumu. The inhumi seem men and women to us when they wish to  -  but no doubt all of you know that.

Mora and Fava looked at me strangely. Inclito said, "I've never seen one I couldn't tell after a minute or two."