In Green's Jungles - Page 40/47

I could not do better, and in all honesty most of my notions were worse. "We visited the hill of ruined landers" was the best of mine, perhaps; but it did not satisfy me.

Far from it.

To elicit their opinions I had to explain what I was doing and display my manuscript to date-six hundred sheets and more, with both sides of every sheet covered with the writing as fine as Oreb's quills and I can make it. "Bird help!" he informed Hide proudly. "Help Silk!" And I explained that he presents me with any large feathers he happens to molt from his wings and tail.

"I had a perch for him in my bedroom in Gaon; and because he left me for close to a year, I got into the habit of using his feathers, which I had picked up off the floor. I missed him, you see, and didn't want the women who came in to sweep and dust and so forth to throw them away. I kept them in my pen case, since no one would be so stupid as to throw out the feathers in a pen case even if it were left open."

Hide said, "Sure."

"After that, it seemed reasonable to point them with my little knife as well, which I did while puzzling over one of the matters of law I had to judge. After that..." Too late, I fell silent.

"Are you embarrassed for my sake?" Jahlee asked. "It's true I don't know how to read and write, but I'm not sensitive about it. If you want to mortify me, quiz me about cooking."

"It's just that what I had intended to say next would have sounded very arrogant. Hide's mother and I wrote an account of Patera Silk's life up to the time we parted from him. And it seemed to me that by writing an account of my search for him-which is what I've been doing here, or at any rate what I like to tell myself I'm doing-I would be continuing it. So I began with the letter from Pajarocu, and talked about meeting with some of the leading people from our town, and the need for new strains of corn and so on. I brought a little seed from the Whorl, by the way, and picked up more in Gaon.

"What we really need, Hide, is not a way of returning to the Whorl, but more and better ways of exchanging goods and information among ourselves. If all of the towns here on Blue would share the plants and animals they brought in their landers, much of the pillaging of three hundred years might be undone."

Hide asked, "Is that how long people up in the Long Sun Whorl were going down into those tunnels Mother used to talk about? How do you know?"

"I don't. I only know that it has been about three hundred years since the Whorl left the Short Sun Whorl. A bit more than three hundred and fifty, really-three hundred and fifty-five, or some such figure. I was assuming rather carelessly that the pillaging had begun as soon as the voyage, which isn't actually very likely."

Hide scratched his ear. "If it's been three hundred years, or about that..."

"Yes?"

"I was thinking about the Duko's old house. Where I shot at the man that stabbed him?"

"The omophagist," Jahlee suggested. "That's what that first man we met beside the river called him."

He had seemed an ordinary-enough man, though we thought him fantastically dressed. He saw that our captive's hands were bound and his feet hobbled, and asked whether we were bringing him to the peltasts. Since I had no idea who those might be, I asked what they would do to him.

"Cut his throat for him and throw him in the river." The stranger laughed, seeing that our prisoner had understood him.

I suggested that he be arrested and tried for stabbing our companion.

"He's an omophagist, sieur. What would be the use of all that? You may as well kill him yourselves and rid the city of him. Where are you from, anyway?"

Terzo, Morello, and Sfido named Soldo; Mora and I, Blanko; and Hide, New Viron.

"I never heard of any of them. Down south, are they?"

With a readiness of wit that surprised and delighted me, Hide said, "We don't think so."

The stranger was eyeing Jahlee. "If women like that one don't wear clothes wherever it is, I'd like to go."

She smiled at him and moistened her lips.

"These peltasts-" I spoke loudly to regain his attention. "Do they administer justice here, and enforce the laws?"

"They're soldiers, sieur. See, the autarch takes them out of the line when they've fought enough and are getting worn down with it. They come back to pick up new men and train them, and meantime, they keep the rest of us respectful, collecting taxes and tolls, and breaking up riots and the rest of it."

"I see. Where might we find some, and a physician?"

"Around here?" He shook his head. "You can't, sieur. There's been nobody much in this part of the city for, well, a good long while."

"How long?" I asked. We had begun to walk again; and he with us, watching Jahlee from the corner of his eye.

"I can't rightly say, sieur." He pointed up the river. "See that white house sticking out? Looks like it's in the water, or just about?"

I shook my head. Hide said, "I see it, Father. It must be three leagues at least."

"Four," Eco declared. "Four, if it's a span."

"My grandfather's," the stranger declared. "He lived there till he died, and that was..." He paused, reckoning. "Sixty-odd years ago. He was one of the last thereabouts, and when he went Grandmother moved in with us. Folks say the city loses a street every generation. I'm not saying that's right, but it's close. Five or six streets in a hundred years, depending. So how long right around here? I can't say exactly, but it's bound to be a long time."

"There are seven thousand steps in a league," Sfido muttered to me. "From what I've seen here, the streets are seventy or eighty double steps apart. Say a hundred to be safe. If Eco's correct in his estimate, four leagues, they've been falling down for about two thousand, five hundred years. If your son is, three-quarters of that should be one thousand, nine hundred, unless I've made an error."

Mora looked at Duko Rigoglio, then at me, and raised her eyebrows.

I nodded. "Old though these houses clearly are, I can't believe they're as old as that. No doubt the rate at which they're abandoned was much higher at one time; but if we accept Cuoio's estimate and the error is fifty percent, they're still a thousand years old, roughly."

Jahlee had taken the stranger's hand, and was walking beside him. "I've been thinking about a city we both know, Rajan."

I nodded.

"It's not exactly abandoned. The slaves fix the old buildings a little when we-when they're made to."

Oreb landed some distance off. "Long way! Go fast."

"He says we must hurry," I interpreted for the rest. "If we have to walk even two leagues before we have any chance of finding a physician, he's quite right."

* * *

Although I thought myself well enough to travel, I find I am very tired now, after a short day's ride. We have stopped for the night with a good deal of daylight left. Hide is taking advantage of it to build us-to build me, I should say, since it is clear it is my well being he has in mind-a little shelter of sticks and pine boughs. We are still in Blanko's territory, I feel sure.

While we ate I read him what I wrote before we left the abandoned farmhouse, for I hope to inspire him to read the entire account eventually, and to that end it cannot be harmful for him to know that he himself figures in it now and then. He was quite curious about the City of the Inhumi, and asked many questions, among them some I had great difficulty answering.

"How old is it?" It was the second time for that.

"As I say, I have no idea, though it must surely be very ancient. There are trees that we here would call large growing from the sides of many of the towers."

"A real big tree's a hundred years old. About that. If you cut it down you can count the rings."

I agreed.

"Say it was a hundred years before one took root-"

"Many hundreds. Those towers were built by the Neighbors, who built everything far better than we men build anything."

"You mean the Vanished People?"

I nodded, watching him as I spooned up the ragout I had made. We have silver cards enough for our needs, and were able to buy mutton, turnips, flour, butter, apples, and salt at a farm we passed.

"How do you know so much about them?"

With another nod I indicated this manuscript. "It's all here. It would require a weary evening to tell you everything, Hide, and in the end you would find out that I actually know next to nothing, though I've spoken with the Vanished People more than once."

"They built that place on Green? Then went away and let the inhumi have it? Why?"

"Because they preferred giving it up-giving both of these whorls up-to living with the inhumi as we do now."

"Why?" he repeated.

I shook my head.

"Don't you know?" He put down his bowl to study me across our little fire.

"No. I think I could guess, but guesses are of little value."

"I'd like to hear it just the same."

I shook my head again.

"All right." He picked up his bowl. "This is pretty good. What's the hot stuff?"

"Ginger."

"You didn't get that around here."

"I got it out of my bag, having brought it from Blanko when Duko Sfido and I left there with our troopers. I'd had more than enough camp food when I was in the hills with General Inclito, so I bought some spices there and took them with me-ginger, red pepper, basil, oregano, and a few others."

"You don't eat much. While I've been with you, you've hardly eaten at all."

"I eat far too much. I try constantly  -  perhaps I should say I try to try constantly  -  to keep it in check."

"The spices sound like my father, but that doesn't. Do you like fish?"

I smiled. "Much too much."

"What would you put on it?"

"Lemon juice and black pepper, I suppose; but no one seems to have black pepper here. We had lemons in Gaon, but I don't think I saw a single lemon in Blanko."

"At home. Suppose we were on the Lizard."

"Seawater and vinegar." I shrugged. "It depends on the variety of fish, somewhat. Oil or butter on the kind we used to call white trout-though it wasn't really trout, of course. It tends to be dry no matter how you cook it." I heard his spoon scrape the bottom of his bowl, and added, "There's a bit more in the pot if you want it."

"I'd rather see you eat it."

I shook my head.

After that we sat in silence for a time, and I began to review what I had already written.

"You know, sometimes I think you really are my father."

"I am."

"Sometimes you talk like him, and sometimes you don't. But he was always writing. He'd work all day in our mill, and eat supper. And then he'd write while the rest of us talked or played games. Sometimes he'd get up while it was still dark, and write until the sun came up, then go out and work."

"I was writing Patera Silk's history," I explained. "His life, insofar as I knew it. When I remembered something fresh while I was working, or when I woke up, I wanted to set it down while the impression was still vivid. Don't forget that your mother wrote too-wrote more than I did, in fact."

"She was making clean copies of what you wrote, mostly."

"She knew many things that I did not-what was said in Patera Silk's final meeting with Councilor Loris, for example, and more than once she suggested ideas and approaches I hadn't thought of."

"Have I ever told you my father's name? Or Mother's?"

I lifted my shoulders again, and let them fall. "I don't recall. What difference does it make?"

"I know I told you I had a brother named Sinew, and a twin brother, and since I told about him I probably said his name's Hoof."

"You may have. It's quite likely."

"Only I don't think I told you Mother's or Father's."

"Your mother's name is Nettle. Mine is Horn."

Hide spooned the last of the ragout into his bowl. "You really are my father, aren't you? Something's happened to you to make you look different."

The happiness I knew at that moment is really indescribable; I managed to say something on the order of "That's it exactly, Son," but I cannot be certain just what it was. I may have said, "My son." Perhaps I did.

"You looked a lot more like him in that other place."

I nodded. "There was a mirror in the guardroom of the barbican-I suppose the guards there used it to shave. Didn't you realize when you saw me there in the Red Sun Whorl that your search had succeeded?"

"Jahlee looked like a real woman there."

"She was a real woman," I told him, "there."

"A bad woman."

"Because she tried to seduce you? You have to understand that she has been doing that sort of thing for much of her life, inviting men. Promising much more than she could ever give them. She could never let men see her naked, for example, as we did, or even let them come close when she stood in a strong light. We went to the Red Sun Whorl, and suddenly everything she had pretended so long had become the truth; she was giddy with it. Try to put yourself in her place."

"All right."

"Seducing you would have been an evil act, and would have had a bad effect on your moral and emotional balance; but she did not know it. She knew only that she could actually give the love she had pretended she would give scores of men. I hope I'm making myself clear."

"Then she isn't really bad?"

I shook my head. "She is an evil creature, exactly as you said."

"You talked like she was your friend, but she was going out at night, flying-"

"Fly good!" Oreb seemed to feel that he had been excluded from our talk for too long.

"Out of the window of her room to drink people's blood. She said so. She told me so."

"Did she? I didn't know. I knew she must be doing it of course, but I didn't know she had confessed to you."