Free In Green's Jungles by Gene Wolfe Page A

them into the water. To the blind man he said, "They dropped you into this sewer thinking you were dead. I understand that, but why did you remain here?"
    The blind man did not reply, pushing past him to finger the clogged corpses, his rusty knife waving like the feeler of some sightless, boneless water creature.
    "Take what you want and go," the man with the black sword told him. "I have work to do."
    "I want to be here when it happens," the blind man said. "I want to see it."
    The man with the black sword made him stand back while he hewed at the corpses, finding that his sword would split the pelvis of a grown man as an axe splits kindling, chopping and slashing until his arm dripped with the reeking fluids of dissolution. At last, when it seemed to him that he had cut to bits at least a hundred corpses, the water that had only seeped and sweated began to trickle and spurt. It was not clean water, yet it seemed clean to him; and laying aside his sword and the light he had been given, he washed his hands in it, and bathed his face.
    "It's what's past," the blind man said. "You see that, don't you? It's the past holding on."
    "More water's getting through now," the man told him as he took up his black sword again. "A little more water, anyway."
    "Water always does."
    "This is new water-better water, I think." The man with the black sword picked up his light, which seemed to weigh nothing.
    The point of his sword pried free a faceless, battered corpse; it fell upon the walkway on which they stood, and he pushed it into the river with his foot. "I believe that I understand what you mean. It may be that I understand it even better than you do. In the past, this whorl we call Green has belonged to the inhumi. These people came here and supplied them with human blood. That must change." He slashed again and again, laying open the rib cages of his human dead, splitting their skulls and severing their limbs. "The future must be set free here."
    As he finished speaking, he felt the blind man's fingers on his back, and knew what they portended. He spun around as the rusty blade drove toward him. He tried to counter it with his black sword, and was struck from behind as the tangled dead gave way at last.
    Very far he was carried by the boiling surge, and nearly drowned. When he was able to gain the riverbank, it was a bank lined with trees so immense as to defy description, trees to dwarf towers, whose mammoth limbs and innumerable, whispering leaves hid the towers of the City of the Inhumi from his sight, and whose topmost leaves were among the stars.
    "That was no story to tell at table, Incanto," Inclito's mother informed me. "I could scarcely eat a mouthful." She cut a piece from her slice of veal with unnecessary violence, then cut that into two smaller pieces.
    I apologized very sincerely.
    "Was it just a story?" Mora demanded. "Do you just make it up?"
    I was hungry, and until then I had been unable even to taste the food Inclito had heaped onto my plate. I shrugged and began to eat.
    "No one said that all the stories tonight had to be true," his mother told her granddaughter. "It was just that your friend Fava began with a true one."
    Fava herself smiled charmingly. "All stories are false, and none are falser than those that are supposed to be true. The lie adds a second lair of falsity."
    Mora turned to look at her. "Even yours?"
    "Even mine, though I made mine as true as I could. The question somebody ought to ask is why Incanto chose to tell that particular story tonight." Fava raised a fragment of boiled potato to her mouth and put it down again. "I'll ask, if no one else does. But it would be better if your father did it."
    Inclito grunted, chewed, and swallowed. "What about yours, Fava? Why'd you tell us about that poor sprat you found in the mountain stream?"
    "Because it was the best that I could think of just then," Fava told him, "and I was first and had to think quickly. Your strego had plenty of time in which to