>>24475204
>the entire planet of weeping
One of my favorite parts.
“On the night we met, I drank your hus’s blood.”
“I remember.”
“It made a beast of me until I fed again. We feed to share your lives, to feel
as you feel.”
“Then feed of me,” I said, and I offered my arm as before.
The tips of his fingers slid along its skin, leaving thin red lines that wept
tears of blood. “There’s another reason. Swear. Swear now that if I tell you,
you’ll never tell anybody else.”
I promised I would not. I am not sure now just what it was I said.
“You’ve got to swear…”
I leaned closer to hear him, my ear at his mouth.
“Because I have to tell you, Father, so I can die. Swear.”
And I did. It was the oath that Silk had taught me aboard the airship. I will
not set it down.
Krait told me, and we talked together until I understood the secret and
what had happened almost twenty years ago; then Krait, seeing that I
understood everything, clasped my hand and begged my blessing before he
died; and I blessed him. I recall his face very clearly; it was as though Sinew
himself were dying, forced by some mad god to wear a serpent mask. I saw the
serpent face, but I sensed the human face behind it.
At the moment of death, it seemed to me that the mighty trees bent over
Krait as I did—that he was in some sense their son as well as in some sense
mine. I was conscious of their trailing lianas as female presences, wicked
women in green gowns with gray and purple moths upon their brown
shoulders and orchids flaming in their hair. Looking up in wonder, I saw only
vines and flowers, and heard only the mournful voices of the brilliantly colored
birds that glide from tree to tree; but the moment that I looked down at Krait
again the green-gowned women and the brutal giants who supported them
returned, mourners sharing my sorrow.
If ever you read this, Sinew, you will not believe it, I know. You have
nothing but contempt for impressions at odds with what you consider simple
truth. But my truth is not yours any more than your mother’s is. Once I
watched a mouse scurry across the floor of a room in the palace I occupied as
Rajan of Gaon. To the mouse, that room with its cushions, thick carpets, and
ivory-inlaid table was a wilderness, a jungle. It may be that as Krait lay dying
the Outsider permitted me to share Krait’s thoughts to some degree, and to see
Green’s jungle as Krait himself did.
To see it as our blood allowed him to see it.
