2

Stories Before Dinner

It is about the middle of the afternoon, I should judge, and I have had an unexpected visitor here at my barrel. I tried to make her as comfortable as I could; she did not complain, and in fact left me a little medallion she says is pure gold. I can still smell her perfume.

But I should not rush ahead of events like this.

I remember the Calde's Palace in Old Viron very vividly, and so I found Inclito's house less impressive than many people must. To set down the truth here (as I must be careful to do in every instance whatsoever) it was less impressive than my own palace in Gaon as well, a palace and a manner of living that I am doing my utmost to forget. The core of the house is the ruin of a building of the Vanished People, and is of stone. The remainder is of brick, of which Inclito is extremely proud. Outside, both stone and brick have been covered with stucco and whitewashed; inside one sees the ancient gray stones and the new red bricks. To give the house its due, all the rooms I saw are large and possess a multitude of big windows; the outer walls are curved, for the most part; the interior walls are generally straight. I got the impression that many had been exterior walls in their time, and that new and bigger rooms had been added as the whim seized the owner, or as funds became available.

Despite hair as white as mine, his mother looked younger than I expected, although she is clearly unwell. None of her son's heavy, coarse features can have come from her. Her face is still smooth, and I would call it almond-shaped if it were not for her hollow cheeks; her nose and mouth are small and delicate, the cheekbones delicate too, high and well defined. It is dominated by her large, dark eyes, which might almost be still-living organs in the face of a corpse.

Her granddaughter, Mora, is clearly her father's daughter, too large and too heavy-limbed and thick-waisted to be called attractive. To be fair, she carries herself well, and seems quiet and intelligent. About fifteen.

Her friend Fava is about half her size, looks blond next to Mora, and is quite pretty. Fava is – or at least appears to be – several years younger. At first I thought her nervous and self-effacing.

Inclito's mother welcomed me graciously, apologized for not rising, warned me that we had an hour or so to wait before dinner, and offered me a glass of wine, which I accepted gratefully, and which her son provided.

"Our own, from my own vines. What do you think?"

I tasted it and pronounced it excellent; and in all honesty it was by no means bad.

The daughter's friend Fava ventured, "You're a dervis? That's what Mora's father told us."

"Then it must be true, " I assured her. "But first of all I'm a stranger here, and unfamiliar with many of your local terms."

The daughter, Mora, offered, "A wandering holy man."

"Wandering, certainly. And a man. Hardly holy."

"But you can tell us thrilling tales of far-off places, " Inclito's mother suggested.

"I could tell your granddaughter and her young friend about the Whorl, which is the only distant place I've ever been to that is genuinely worth knowing about, madam; but you and your son will already have done that, and much better than I ever could."

Mora asked, "Where were you before you came here?" at which her father gave her a severe look.

"In a little village a day's travel south of your town, where a woodcutter and his wife took me in."

"This isn't a law court, " Inclito rumbled.

His mother smiled. "No more questions, we promise. I shall offer a remark, however, if I may. It is not intended to be offensive."

I assured her that I was remarkably difficult to offend before dinner.

"Well, if my Inclito, my famous one, had not told me about you first, I would have thought that you were a male witch when I caught sight of you. A strego, we would have said when I was a girl. That would have made me very happy, because I would have asked you for a charm for health when the moment was ripe. If you were a strego, you'd be a good one, I'm certain, with that face."

"Then I wish I were, madam. I would be very happy to restore you to health, if I could."

"You could pray for her, " Mora suggested.

"I will. I do."

Fava smiled; it was a smile, it seemed to me, at once appealing and malicious-or at least mischievous. "I want to play the game, and I'm company, too. You're older than I am, though, Incanto. Will you play the game if I beg very prettily?"

I smiled in return; I could not help myself, although like Inclito I suspect her. "If it involves running or wrestling, I beg to be excused. Otherwise I will play any game you wish, for as long as you wish it."

"Oh, I can't run!"

Inclito's mother said, "It's a silly game, really. But we do it because we used to at home. Fava likes it because she always wins."

"I don't! You won yourself last night."

"All of you voted for me out of kindness, " the older woman said.

"They tell stories, " Fava explained to me. "And at the end everybody votes, only you can't vote for your own. The person who wanted to play has to go last."

"Then I invite all of you to play with me, " I said. "I'll need to hear your stories so that I'll know what sort of story I ought to tell."

Fava began to argue, but Inclito's mother silenced her with a trembling finger. "You must go first. I think it's by going last that you win so much."

To me she added, "We mustn't interrupt. That's the chief rule we have in this. If you interrupt, you'll have to pay her a forfeit."

Fava's Adventure: The Washed Child.

This happened two years ago, when a little group of us went to Soldo to visit our relatives there. They had a large farm. It wasn't as large as this one or as rich as this one either, but it was bigger and richer than most of the farms in that part of the whorl. Bigger and richer than most of the farms here, for all of that.

Now the farthest field of that farm was the last plowed land to the east. It was at the foot of a mountain, and beyond it the slope was too steep for plowing. They grazed sheep and goats up there, and the young men went there sometimes to hunt. They wouldn't take me with them, so one fine day I decided I'd go by myself. I didn't have a slug gun or a bow or anything of that sort, because I didn't really want to kill an animal, no matter how fine it was. I have a horror of blood, as most of you know. I can't bear to watch a pig slaughtered or even see ducks killed.

Everybody got up early there just as we do here, but I got up earlier than anybody. I was up and dressed and crossing the fields before shadeup, and as the old people say. I remember that I was afraid it wouldn't be daylight when I went under the trees, but I needn't have worried. It had started getting light before I reached them, and by the time I was in the high forest there was real daylight so that things had shadows. It was a perfectly lovely forest, too. The sheep and goats had cleared out most of the underbrush and left the big trees, so that it seemed to me that I was walking in a huge building like the cappellas of the gods back in the old whorl. Of course I've never seen those, but Salica has told me a lot about them since I got here, and that forest was like the buildings she was describing. Mora will be wondering if I wasn't afraid of getting lost, because she always is in a strange place. But I wasn't. I was climbing all the time, and I knew that all I would have to do to get back to the farm where I was staying was to follow the slope back down. I was very confident, you see, and so I went on for quite a long way.

After climbing like that half the morning, I came upon a little stream. It was icy cold, as I learned by drinking from it, snowmelt from the mountaintop. The way in which it had carved a path for itself through the rock looked interesting, and I decided to follow it awhile before I went back.