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

"It is. He may be calling himself something else  -  I have no way of knowing. But the young man Eco talked about didn't sound like my son. You indicated that you came with many of the same questions you and Fava had last night; this cannot have been one of them. What are they?"

She waved their questions aside. "You wrote those letters."

"The ones that Rimando and Eco are going to carry to Olmo and Novella Citta? Yes, I did. I wrote them with your father's permission, and he read them before he signed them. Do you want to know what was in them?"

Mora shook her head. "Rimando's is in his saddlebag. I could go out to the stable right now and read it if I wanted to. I could, but I'd have to break the seal. Does that bother you? That I could read it?"

"Not in the slightest."

"All right." She leaned forward, her brutal, girlish face intent. "For just a minute, this morning just before Decina came, we were someplace else. Fava and I were, I think, and I asked Torda about it and she said she was too. Was that Green?"

I nodded again.

"You did it to turn me against Fava."

"I didn't do it at all. Not consciously at least."

"But you've been there? Is that what you call the jungle? What we saw and smelled and felt?"

"Yes, it is. I have not said so."

"At dinner yesterday you got inside Fava's story and changed things around. Did it really happen?"

"I suppose it did. I didn't do it consciously."

"Good Silk!"

For half a minute or longer, Mora studied me, her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. At last she said, "I meant what Fava told about. Did that really happen? Did you try to use an inhuma to fool your son?"

"No."

"It was just made up?"

I nodded. "I've told you I don't know how I did those things, if I did them. That was the truth, but I've been thinking a lot about them, as you can imagine. Would you like to hear my theory? Telling someone else may make it clearer in my own mind."

"Go ahead."

"Suppose that the Duko were to build a road to facilitate the passage of his horde to the border. Might not troopers from Blanko use that same road to besiege Soldo?"

"I don't think I understand this."

"Neither do I, but I'm trying to. Have you ever seen a dead inhumu? One who had been personating a human being?"

"You told me that I hadn't seen one at all. I still haven't, not close up."

"I have, and more often than I like."

Those were magic words, although I had been ignorant of their power when I pronounced them. As a small boy I had heard the stories all children hear, and used to imagine that if only I could stumble upon the correct syllables a garden would spring up where our neighbors' houses stood, a place of mystery and beauty in which the trees bore emeralds that turned to diamonds as they ripened, and fountains ran with milk or wine. Eventually I came to realize that the immortal gods were the only spirits who granted the wishes of men, and that prayers were the magic words I had sought. It thrilled me, as it still does; but when I told my friends my discovery, they only sneered and turned away.

Now  -  very far from those friends, men and women I will never see again  -  I had stumbled upon words that were magic indeed. No sooner had I pronounced them than I found myself back in Green's jungles, squatting beside the young man who had joined us and fought beside us, as he writhed and bled beneath the arching roots.

"Tell me again why you hate the inhumi, " he asked, as if we two were sitting at ease in my bedroom in Inclito's house, and had all the time in the whorl.

"I've never told you anything of the kind, " I said, "or talked to you at all until this moment."

"You'll know me when I'm gone."

"They drink our blood. Isn't that enough?"

"No." His face was a mask of pain.

"Incanto?" Mora was concerned for me.

"What is it?"

"Are you all right?"

I nodded. "His mother  -  Krait's mother  -  she was the one, you see. We were as poor... You've been rich all your short life. You can't imagine how poor we were."

"I could try."

"We had shared out everything when we landed, we who had come from Old Viron and the new people, the sleepers, the ones who had slept three hundred years in the caverns of the Whorl. Do you know about them, Mora? Their memories had been tampered with, like Mamelta's, so they were confused in strange ways."

No doubt she thought I was one of them, for which I cannot blame her; but she nodded politely.

"The tools and the seeds and the frozen embryos, though there weren't many of those. No human embryos at all. They'd been taken, every one of them. Special talents, you see  -  untamed and unpredictable abilities that were supposed to help us; but they had been taken by those who had broken the seals. Taken and sold, long ago."

"No cut, " Oreb advised me. "Good Silk!"

"Silk had been one of them. Silk had been our leader. That was his talent, leadership. People trusted and followed him, and he tried-I tried very hard, Mora, not to mislead them, not to lead them astray and betray them. But Silk had remained behind in the Whorl with Hyacinth, and it almost destroyed us."

"I see, " Mora said, although clearly she did not.

"Our women were supposed to bear the animals, exactly as Maytera Marble's granddaughter had, bear horses and sheep and cattle and donkeys. Nettle couldn't, because she was carrying Sinew, and so we gave ours to a woman she had known all her life who promised to give it back to us when it was born. But she didn't, she wouldn't. She said it had been stillborn. Many of them were, but that one was not. She hid it from us until she thought we wouldn't know, and it was only a little, long-necked animal, like a little camel without a hump, after all. It wouldn't plow, and she and the man who lived with her killed it trying to make it plow, and so we were so poor  -  Nettle and I were so poor  -  because Silk had not come.

"We sold part of the land they had given us, and bought a donkey, but the donkey died. Eventually we sold the rest of our land and ate what little we got for it, and bought milk for Sinew when Nettle's dried up, and lived in a tent on the Lizard, a little tent I made for us from the skins of the rock goats I hunted. That was when she came, Krait's mother, and Sinew nearly died.

"My son's name was Krait, did I tell you?"

Poor Mora shook her head. "You said your son's name was Sinew."

"Yes. Yes, it was. But when he died  -  when Krait died there in the jungle  -  the illusion was last to die. I think it always is. The illusion of humanity. It is a thing of the spirit, you see, and so partakes of immortality. The spirit is the breath, Mora."

She nodded again, hesitantly; I could not tell whether she understood everything or nothing.

"They reshape themselves. That is the animal. That was how they lived and how they reproduced until the Neighbors came and found them, and were themselves found by them. It is the animal, as I said.

A chemical woman like Maytera Marble carries within her half the plans necessary to build a new chem, and a chemical man like Hammerstone, the other half, did you know that? It was how they began to build Olivine. You've probably never seen a chem."

I showed her the eye I am bringing to Maytera Marble.

"The animal part is easy. We had lizards at home that could change their skins to look like human skin, and there are bugs that shape themselves to look like other bugs, or like sticks, or the heads of deadly snakes. When an inhumu dies, it seems to be a human being  -  Krait seemed to be a young man there to the end, there in Green's jungles. A young man when he died and for some time afterward. When it was too late, I saw him as I had seen him on the sloop."

There was a mirror above the bureau; I went to it and stood before it trembling. "Do you see this face, Mora? Of course you do. It is the only face you can see. It is not my face, however. Come and look."

"I won't!"

"Poor girl!" Oreb flew to her, and would have comforted her if he could.

"Suppose that Fava were to die, Mora, and that you waited at her deathbed as I waited beside Krait. I had stayed behind, you see, because he had fought for us. I had been wounded too, but I tried to get some of the others to carry him. They would not, Mora. I ordered them to, but they only shook their heads and turned away, even Sinew; and in the end they would not carry me either. They left me just as they had left him, and I made myself stand and go back to him.

"You would hear Fava's last words, just as I heard his. Perhaps she would tell you the secret, the great secret they fear so much that we will learn. You would hear the rattle of Hierax in her throat, the rattle that he kept and would not allow his younger sisters to play with. In a second or two, she would cease to breathe. Do you understand, Mora? Am I making myself clear?"

She nodded.

"Still-still!  -  you would see the child you had known as Fava lying in her bed. Her face would appear shrunken, its full cheeks pale and not so full. Yet still Fava, a human being of about your own age."

"She got a lot older just before she went away, " Mora said hesitantly. "Like Grandmother."

"Because so much of her food had been taken from your grandmother while she slept. Foolish people think that they will see the marks of the fangs, and there will be blood on the sheets. The truth is that the marks are small and white, and do not bleed. An inhumu's fangs are round, you see, and the wounds made by all such round things close themselves, unless they are very large. In addition, I imagine that Fava was wise enough to bite your grandmother in a place where she couldn't see her wounds  -  on her back, perhaps, or on the backs of her legs.

"You would see Fava lying there dead, exactly as you had always known her. Then you would blink away tears, or look aside for a moment; and when you looked back at her, you would see something that did not look human at all, a beast dressed like a girl, its scaly face painted and powdered, and its hair a wig. Around New Viron, farmers like your father put up lay figures to frighten birds. Do they do that here, too?"

She nodded again.

"Have you ever seen one from a distance when you were out riding, and thought it a real person?"

"I think I understand, but I still don't understand how you took us to Green before breakfast."

"Because the illusion was there, and was strong-when I looked at Fava I saw a girl, though I knew better. She was impressing her reality upon my mind, just as the Duko wants to impress the governmental system of his town upon Blanko. But something in my mind seized the links Fava had forged between the three of us and herself, shouting its own reality, which was and is mine. There were bugles and trumpets all along the road, Mora, and the crash and rattle of marching men with slug guns. All of that was exactly as Duka Fava had intended, but the men were not hers."

"I think I understand, " Mora said slowly.

"I hope so. I don't believe I can explain it any better than I have."

"Can I ask about the sacrifice? What you saw in the bull?"

"You may, of course. But I doubt that I can tell you more now than I did then."

"You said one wouldn't go. Does it mean that only one letter will, or-"

"I suppose so."

"Or are you just saying that either Rimando or Eco is going to stay here?"

"That's a good question." For a few seconds I was at a loss, trying to recall exactly what intimations I had received from the bull's entrails.

"Did you see whether the letters would be delivered?"

I shook my head. "I saw nothing about the letters. It's actually very rare for anyone to see anything concerning an object, as apart from a human being. I saw signs I took to represent the names of the messengers-that is to say, I saw a thorny branch, which I took to represent Rimando, in a dome, which I took to represent Eco. Only a single line departed from there, directed toward an O, which I took to be the sign for Olmo."

"Eco has the letter for Olmo. Rimando's is for Novella Citta. Is he going to get scared tonight? Too scared to go?"

"I have no way of knowing. If you're asking whether I saw anything of that kind in the victim, I did not. What about you? You've talked to him in private, and you're practically a woman, as I've said before. What do you think?"

"I don't think so. He said that it wasn't really going to be very dangerous, just a long, tiring ride. He wants me to suggest to Papa to let him keep his horse for a reward."

"I see. Are you going to do it?"

"I don't think so, " she repeated. "You say I talked to Rimando, just the two of us. You wanted to talk to Torda like that yourself."

"I didn't intend to imply that there was anything wrong with your speaking to him, only that you had, and were likely to have more insight into his character than I do."

"You told Torda what she was supposed to do when she sacrificed our bullock. What else did you tell her?"

"Good girl, " Oreb declared. "Bird hear."

Mora smiled.

"I think he means that you should be told everything I told Torda, " I said. "He's probably right. You realize, I hope, that I can't tell you anything she told me."

"All right."

I sighed and leaned back in my chair, sorry to see the friendly relationship I had built up with Mora destroyed. "I acted against your interests, if you like."

"You mean you want Papa to marry her."

"If he wants to, yes."

"So I won't get the farm. I'll never be mistress of this house or rich. I know you think I'm rich now, but it doesn't do me any good."

"You think it does not."

"I know it doesn't. I'm not just the biggest girl in my class. There's more to it."

"I realize that."

"Do you know what I'm scared of? Really, really scared of? I want to say what I've been so scared of all my life, but it wouldn't be the truth. What I've been so scared of for the past year?"