by Gene Wolfe
Nor was I wrong. Ducking under the lintel, I heard him fall, and his muffled cry. In what must once have been the solaria, he was struggling with a skeletal, nearly naked assailant. I saw the dull gleam of steel and snatched at the filthy wrist as the knife came up.
My fingertips only brushed it.
Rigoglio's gasp as the knife went home was followed at once by the boom of a slug gun, close and deafeningly loud. The skeletal attacker stiffened and shrieked, empty hands raised before his filthy, bearded face.
"Don't shoot him," I told Hide, and was seconded at once by Oreb, who was flying in tight circles above our heads: "No shoot! No shoot! No shoot!"
Looking up at him, I thought for a moment that it was a painted ceiling I saw beyond him; but it was the sky, a clear, star-spotted sky so dark that it seemed practically black; the roof and upper floor of the house had fallen in, leaving only its walls standing.
"I missed him?" Hide sounded disgusted with himself.
"Don'. Don'." Hesitantly, Rigoglio's attacker was getting his feet.
"Man run," Oreb warned us.
"You're right," I told him. "He will run, and Hide will shoot and kill him, and we will have lost him." I caught him by the arm as I spoke.
We tied his hands behind him with what remained of the cords that had bound Rigoglio, Morello, and Terzo, and contrived a hobble for his ankles that allowed him to take small steps. He seemed to have lost the power of speech almost entirely-it is no exaggeration to say that Oreb could talk better-and was so clearly mad that I was very happy indeed that Hide had not killed him. I had seen the tunnel gods that Urus and his fellow convicts had called bufes, and had killed several of them before Mamelta and I were apprehended; this new prisoner of ours recalled them so vividly that when I was not looking directly at him, or was preoccupied with my own thoughts, it seemed to me that we were accompanied by one, starved, vicious, and desperate.
Rigoglio was badly wounded, as we found when we had ripped his shirt away. We bandaged him as well as we could with strips torn from it, and I promised that we would let Morello and Terzo carry him as soon as we found materials from which to contrive a stretcher.
He managed to smile as he struggled to his feet. "I can walk, Master Incanto. For a while anyway."
"Leave him here with the boy to guard him," Morello suggested, "while the rest of us look for help."
Mora sheathed her sword. "What if we don't find any?"
"There are more of them here," I told her. "More who are watching us, and listening as we speak. I feel their eyes, as your husband did earlier."
Sfido nudged Eco and whispered, "Having a nice honeymoon?"
Overhearing him Mora said, "It's had its good and bad, but I've got to admit this is the low point so far."
"For which Jahlee, the Duko, and I are all to blame," I told her. "I was about to say that if we were to leave Rigoglio and Cuoio here, they would be attacked-probably as soon as we were well away, certainly after nightfall. No, His Grandeur must come with us, walking if he can, carried if he cannot."
I had begun walking myself as I spoke, and they followed me, Morello and Terzo beside their Duko to assist him.
"Oreb!"
He dropped to the ground at my feet, neither bird nor dwarf.
"Have you seen people in this place? Not people like this man we've tied up, but normal people, people like us?"
He bobbed his head. "Flock men! Flock girls! See god?"
"No, not there. Lead us to them, please. The Duko requires a physician."
"Big wet! Come bird!" He flew.
One ruined street led to another, and that to a third. Eco and Mora hurried ahead after Oreb; I lagged, staring horrified at that desert of abandonment and decay, and soon got the position I wanted, beside Hide and behind the Duko, Terzo, and Morello.
Jahlee joined me there, naked still save for her long hair. "You did this, didn't you?"
I shook my head.
"I'm not angry, I'm very grateful. You have a wonderful, wonderful father, Cuoio. I'll never be able to repay him for all he's done for me."
Hide nodded, his face guarded.
"But you said it was me and you and Duko Rigoglio, Incanto. I don't think he had anything to do with it, and I know I didn't. I've never lied to you. I hope you know that."
I told her that not being a complete fool I knew nothing of the sort.
"All right, once or twice, maybe, when I had to. Will you lie to me if I ask a straight question?"
"Not unless I must."
"Fair enough. Could you take us back? Right now?"
Hide turned to look at me, startled.
"I don't know," I said. "Perhaps. I believe so."
"And I-?" Jahlee glanced at Hide.
"You're prettier now," he said.
"You will be again what you were, unless I am very much mistaken," I told her. "I cannot be certain, but that is certainly my opinion. Hide, you must remember that there were an old woman and a young one living in the farmhouse in which we stayed."
He nodded.
"The old one was presumed to be the farmer's mother, and to own the farm. You brought in a chair for her, saying that she should not have to stand in her own home."
"Sure."
"I may have told you that both were called Jahlee. I know I told Mora that."
Hide nodded. "Everybody says the young one was named for her grandmother."
"They are the same person-the person who is walking with us-and an inhuma."
Jahlee hissed. "My secret! You swore!"
"I swore I wouldn't tell unless I was forced to. I am forced to now. Hide is my son, and you will seduce him if you can. Don't deny it, please. I know better."
Giving her no time to reply, I spoke to Hide. "Honesty compels me to tell you that Jahlee is not an inhuma at present. She is a human being here, exactly as we are, and I believe for the same reason. But if we return to our real whorl, and I believe that we will, she will be again what she was before we came. Someday soon you will take a wife, as I did when I was younger-"
I felt a strange confusion, and having no mirror looked down at my thick-fingered hands, turning them this way and that.
"You look different." With more penetration than I had ever given him credit for, Hide had discerned my thoughts. "Maybe we all do."
I shook my head. "You don't."
"You really look a lot more like my real father here. You're taller than he was and older, but you look more like him than you used to."
"You were lying when you called him your son! I should have known! "
"He is my spiritual son," I told Jahlee, "and I was not lying-though he himself believes I was. I was going to say, Hide, that you will soon marry. I was a year younger than you are when your mother and I were married. Go clean to your marriage bed. It is better so."
"Yes, Father." He nodded slowly.
I turned to Jahlee. "I can take us back, or at least I think it likely that I can. If I do, I believe that you will be what you were. Do you wish me to do it now?"
"No!"
"Then watch your tongue, and put on clothing when you can find some."
Oreb sailed over our heads, a miniature airship. "Big wet!"
"He's right." Jahlee pointed, and I caught the glimmer of water ahead.
It was a mighty river, the largest I have ever seen, a river so large that the farther bank was nearly invisible. A wide and ruinous road of dark stone ran beside the water, which lapped its edges in places, leaving the great, dark paving blocks slimed and filthy in a way that recalled the sewer on Green. Guided by Oreb, we followed this ancient road, walking upstream as nearly as I could judge and forced to adjust our steps from time to time by wide gaps in its spalling, rutted pavements.
In a troubled voice, Hide said, "If we went back, we could take the Duko to a doctor in Blanko, couldn't we?"
"No!" Jahlee caught his arm. "Please, Cuoio. Think of me."
"He's trying not to," I told her, "but finds the effort futile.
We could indeed take Duko Rigoglio to a physician in Blanko, Hide, a daylong ride for a well-mounted man. Will he still have his wound if we return to Blue, do you think? A knife wound he can show to a physician?"
He glanced quickly at me, surprised, then looked away.
"We are spirits here. Watch." I extended my hand, and my black-bladed sword took shape, floating before us until I reached out and grasped it-and felt it grasp me in return. "My staff has been left behind," I told Jahlee, "and it is better to have something, perhaps."
Hide slung the slug gun with which he had been guarding our prisoners and touched my arm. "If you can do that, Father, can't you heal the Duko?"
"I doubt it, but I will try."
Rigoglio must have heard us; I saw him look back at us-by then he was walking with his arms over his friends' shoulders-and the pain in his eyes.
"Would you want him back on Blue," I asked Hide, "with his spirit wounded and bleeding inside him, invisible to us and beyond our help? That is what befell certain mercenaries, who fought for me in the City of the Inhumi."
"I don't understand any of this, Father."
"It's very likely no one does." I softened my voice still more. "I wanted to take us to Green, where Sinew is. I wanted to see him again, as I still do, and I wanted you others-you and Duko Sfido particularly, and Mora and Eco as well, after they providentially appeared-to see what real evil is, so that you might understand why we on Blue must come together in brotherhood before our own whorl becomes what Green already is."
I fell silent, forced to think myself about what I myself had just said.
22
The Barbican and the Bear Tower
Hide and Jahlee came in together while I sat here wondering how to begin the next stage of my account. I asked them to summarize what we had seen and done.
"I learned why women weep," Jahlee said; and Hide, "We took the Duko home to die."
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.