In Green's Jungles by Gene Wolfe Page B

His body was still covered with mud when they brought it into the house. I have hated the sight of mud ever since, as my son will tell you. Old Schiamazza had to help my mother wash him. I could not do it. The embalmers washed him again, or so they assured me, but his body smelled of mud until the coffin was closed, even though it had been embalmed and dressed in clean, new clothes.
    I talked to my mother one night. I cannot say now how long after Solenno's death it was. A week or two, or a month. Something like that. I was in despair. I did not know what to do. I told her over and over how much I had loved Turco, and I said that for me it was as though Turco had died three times.
    She nodded and hugged me and heard me out, and when I had talked and wept until I could weep no more she said, "You have been trying to find him again. I thought so all along, and now I know it. Solenno looked somewhat like him, everybody saw it. And Gioioso always made me think of Turco. Their voices and gestures were just the same."
    I sighed, perhaps, and wiped my eyes. I could weep no more, as I have told you.
    "Listen to me, my daughter. Turco is dead. You must find someone you can love for himself, not because he reminds you of Turco."
    And I did. I found Inclito's father. Do you want to know what he looked like? Look at my son. Big and strong and rough, but good. Such a good man, and he loved me as a deer the plain. He laid his heart at my feet, and we were wed. A month passed. Then two. Then three. A year! I bore a son and lost him, but next year I bore my Inclito. Together we saw him weaned, and watched him learn to walk.
    One day my husband showed me a pair of dirty old boots, caked with mud. "Whose are these?" he asked me.
    I looked at them. They seemed familiar, but that was all I could tell him.
    "These were a trooper's riding boots. Was your brother in the cavalry? Or your father?"
    They were Casco's, of course. I don't think that I had so much as mentioned Casco to my husband before that day, but I told him the whole story, exactly as I have told it to you tonight.
    "Ah," he said, and he put the boots on the floor and stood beside them. "Too small for me. I could never get my feet in them, and a good thing, too, because there's something in them already."
    He picked up the right boot and showed it to me, a sharp white splinter pushed through the leather at the ankle that looked almost like a sliver of bone. "That is a death adder's fang," he explained, "or anyway that's what I think it is. If the man these boots belonged to had kept his sword, he wouldn't have had to kill the thing with his feet, and he might be alive today."
    From that you already understand what came before it, I feel certain. Gioioso had found the boots and worn them when he went hunting. The dried poison from the fang had entered his foot slowly until there was enough to stop his heart. Poor Solenno had found them too, in the back of the closet that had become his, and had worn them when he went to look at my father's muddy field.
    It is all simple and reasonable, you will say. I am older than any of you, and it seems to me that there is more to be said. Turco had avenged himself, as the strego had warned Casco he would. Have you ever seen another person who reminded you of yourself?
    No one? What about you, Fava? Incanto?
    You shake your heads. We never do, you see. I have been told many times that such-and-such a woman looks exactly like me. And I have visited her and spoken to her, and come away feeling that no one could resemble me less. So it was with Turco. To my mother and me, Gioioso and Solenno seemed very like Turco. But to Turco himself they resembled Casco. Like Casco, they were rivals for my hand. And they wore boots of the same size, after all.
    "That was a fine story," I told her, "one of the best that I've ever heard."
    "I had to live it," she replied, "and it is far better to hear such stories than to live them, I promise you, though it ended so