Free In Green's Jungles by Gene Wolfe Page B

think, and he's much too clever to tell that story merely to win the game."
    Inclito's mother said severely, "It's very impolite of you to call Incanto a strego, Fava, when he's denied it. He is our guest."
    Mora said, "If Papa won't ask, I will. Why did you tell us that story, Incanto?"
    I sipped my wine as I considered my answer. "All the stories tonight have been about duty, or that was how it seemed to me. You were miserable in your palaestra, and Fava thought it her duty to help you, as she did. In her own story, she thought it her duty to rescue the child from his mother, and to look for him when he disappeared."
    Inclito nodded. "Mano did his duty, and he was a man who would murder his own brother. There's something I want to ask Fava about that story of hers, though. The boy, Fava. What was it you called him? Bricco. At the end you said he'd never come back to his family?"
    Fava nodded.
    "But those other sprats, the ones he used to play with, they saw him every so often. They said the Vanished People had stolen him?"
    Fava nodded again.
    "Well, when they saw him, did the Vanished People bring him back?"
    She laughed-a good, merry laugh that left me feeling entirely certain that she was more mature than she appeared. "I should have asked them that. I don't know. Perhaps he escaped from them every now and then, and tried to return to his family and his old life."
    "But he couldn't," I remarked. By that time I felt certain I had been right about her.
    Inclito pursued the topic. "There was one of them with the man in Incanto's story. This Bricco sounds like one himself, like he had joined them, almost."
    Fava nodded. "That was why the other children associated him with them, I feel sure."
    Mora said, "There aren't any, are there, Papa? That's what you always say."
    "There are stories." He helped himself to more veal. "We heard one tonight."
    "There are the old houses," Mora said. "Not like ours, but old houses of theirs that nobody wants." Her slow speech may have given her words more weight than she intended. "People see those, and at night they see travelers camping in them, and they imagine there's a town full of them that we can't find."
    "Incanto believes in them," her father declared. "What do you know about them, Incanto?"
    His mother reached across him to prod my arm. "Do eat something. Why, you've hardly touched your food."
    To satisfy her I swallowed another bite. "I've been fasting up until this meal. What I've eaten already is more than enough for me."
    "You didn't talk about my story." It was her accusatory tone again. "You said all the stories had been about duty. Mine was about ghosts and witchcraft."
    "In that case I was mistaken. I apologize, humbly and contritely."
    Mora asked, "Do you believe in witchcraft, Incanto? In stregas and stregos, like my grandmother? In ghosts?"
    "I believe in ghosts." I recalled Hyacinth's ghost and its effect upon Pig very vividly, but I chose not to mention that memory. "The best man I've ever known told me once, long ago, that he had seen one, the ghost of an elderly man with whom he had lived and whom he had assisted. He wouldn't have lied to me-or to anybody, if he could help it-and he was a careful observer."
    I spoke to Inclito's mother. "It was Turco's ghost who did his duty, or that was how it seemed to me. Turco felt that it was his duty as your husband to protect you from Casco, and from two men whom he feared were like Casco, or might become like him. You didn't see that in either of them?"
    She shook her head, and I said, "The dead must look at people differently."
    Inclito nodded. "I think so too. Men and women, it's the same. A girl is crazy about some man. Her mother likes him too, but she won't say so. Her father knows he's a loafer and a thief. I see it all the time."
    Mora told me, "You haven't answered Papa's question about the Vanished People yet, and you haven't said anything about witches. If you believe in ghosts, you have to believe in witches,