In Green's Jungles

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 ca

"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.

"Only we'd have to go through the Old Yard, and come up on the barbican from in back. That's not regular." He paused. "Some that went in the Old Yard might not come out, too, if you take my meaning. Now get moving, all of you."

I walked beside him, Hide just ahead of us. "Are you bringing us to a physician?"

"To the lochage."

"Your officer?"

He nodded. "What's her name? The one with my cloak?"

" "Jahlee.

"Jahlee! You get back here!"

She smiled at him. "Were you afraid I was going to run away?"

"You wouldn't get far, but you wouldn't be any use to me after, either."

Hide shot a glance at him that I hoped he did not see.

"That's mine you got on, and that means you're mine. Get me? You're not with the rest, you're separate."

"And yours." She had taken up a position on his left (I myself was on his right), and she linked her arm with his.

It had been a long and a weary walk, and we were all tired already. Duko Rigoglio had collapsed. His friends had carried him until they could carry him no longer; then the guard had stopped a wagon and compelled the driver to take all of us to the barbican, a low, frowning, thick-walled fortress built on arches over a dry ditch.

"We'll bury him there." The guard had jerked his thumb toward the cemetery. "Only not up here. Close to the river."

I shook my head. "He must live."

But the lochage was of the guard's opinion and told me that I was a master of the torturers' guild.

"I am not," I insisted. "We are poor travelers, visitors. We reached this city of yours only today, following the river north. I have never tortured anyone, and never will."

"He had a sword, too," the guard told the lochage, "only he did something with it when I wasn't looking. The rest say he's a witch."

The lochage nodded thoughtfully, dipped his pen, and scribbled on a scrap of parchment.

"He needs blood," Jahlee told him. "Understand, I don't care if he lives or dies. It's nothing to me. But he needs blood. He's bled nearly dry, anybody can see that."

The lochage looked up from his scrap of parchment. "Are you with them, strumpet?"

"I was, but I'm with him now." She pointed to the guard.

"Then get her out of here."

The guard obeyed.