In Green's Jungles Read Online Free PDF Page B

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
    T his 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