In Green's Jungles by Gene Wolfe Page A

remember that the dead can avenge themselves."
    The strego's familiare spoke too. I have heard a good many talking birds, but all they say is nonsense. Schiamazza swore that this one spoke to Casco as one man to another, saying, "Beware! Beware!" It fluttered its wings, and it and the strego vanished together.
    Casco raised his saber as before, held it up for a moment when he prayed or cursed, and plunged it to the hilt into the newly dug soil of my husband's grave. After that he rose and stamped and kicked poor Turco's flowers, she said, and seemed almost to dance upon his grave in his fury. It had frightened her so much that she fled.
    Let me stop here for a moment or two. I see the questions in your eyes, Incanto. I will try to answer them. There was a wall around our orchard and burial plot, a stone wall about as high as that door, with two gates in it. The gate farther from the house was kept locked when it was not in use. Boys climbed the wall to steal fruit sometimes, however, so it may be that the strego climbed it, too. It is also possible that he had been in our house, and had followed Casco outside just as Schiamazza did. My father, my mother, or my brother may have been consulting him in secret. Who can say? For my own part, I think it likely that he flew into our orchard as the birds did, in a bird's shape or his own. In the Whorl, where we knew nothing of the inhumi, it was known that stregos can fly when they wish. You young people may mock me for saying it, but you have heard many such stories from me, and there is a grain of truth in every one of them. More than a grain, in many.
    At first we thought that Casco's family would bury him, but his father and both his brothers had been killed in the same battle in which he had been wounded, and no one remained except a grandmother, an old woman such as I am now, much too foolish and confused for any business more serious than baking a pie. She gave my father money, I believe, and he made all the funeral arrangements. Casco's uniform no longer fit him, as I said, and so he was buried in a good velvet tunic that my brother had outgrown. For months afterward, I did not even know what had become of his clothes and the long saber that my brother had pulled from my husband's grave.
    My first husband. That is what I meant to say. I have been married five times, Fava, though you would not think that anyone would have me to look at me now. It is still terribly hard for me to talk about these things, which would only bore you and Mora anyway. I will pass over them as quickly as I can tonight.
    I married again the next summer. He was a wonderful man, handsome and kind. Autumn came, and he went hunting with two friends. It was the first time that we had been separated. He fell from his horse, they said, and when they picked him up he was dead.
    For months I could not credit it. I used to awaken when the servant knocked and leave my bed, feeling quite certain that he would come back to me in a day or two. As I washed and dressed, his death would close in on me like a fist. It was horrible. Horrible!
    Three years passed before I married again, a good man, quiet, hardworking, and studious. For me, he said, he was willing to dare the curse. By that time many were saying that there was a curse on me, you see. I was not yet twenty, and I had buried two husbands. The worst hinted that I had murdered them.
    For seventeen months we lived together very happily. Then my father fell ill. He had workmen ditching a field he owned, a low swampy one that he thought might do to pasture cattle if it could be drained. Because he could not leave his bed and my brother was living in the city, he asked my husband to look at it for him and let him know how the work was going. His name was Solenno. My husband's name, I mean. My third husband. Gioioso had been my second husband.
    Solenno was a trifle taller than Gioiosio, as well as I can remember. Or perhaps it is only that time has made him seem so.