Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories

  “Nobody told me!” I said. I had that draining-away feeling again. I was quite glad when Terens took hold of my elbow and said something like, “Steady, steady!”

  “Are you telling the truth?” Neal said.

  “I’m sure he is,” Lewin said. “Your sister has his eyes.”

  “Ask Timas,” said Orm. “He married your mother the year after I did. He can take being bossed about. I can’t. I went back to my dragons. But I suppose there’s a record of that?” he said challengingly to Lewin.

  “And the divorce,” said Lewin. “Terens looked it up for me. But I expect the Slavers have destroyed it by now.”

  “And she never told you?” Orm said to me. He wagged his shaggy eyebrows at me almost forgivingly. “I’ll have a bone to pick with her over that,” he said.

  Mother arrived just as we’d all got down into the valley. She looked very indomitable, as she always does on horseback, and all our people were with her, down to both our shepherds. They had carts of clothes and blankets and food. Mother knew the valley as well as Orm did. She used to meet Orm there when she was a girl. She set out for the Reserve as soon as she heard the broadcast about the invasion, and the dragon we sent her met them on the way. That’s Mother for you. The rest of the neighbors didn’t get there for some hours after that.

  I didn’t think Mother’s face—or Timas’s—could hold such a mixture of feelings as they did when they saw Neal and me and the Dragonate men all with Orm. When Orm saw Mother, he folded his arms and grinned. Huffle rested his huge chin on Orm’s shoulder, looking interested.

  “Here she comes,” Orm said to Huffle. “Oh, I do love a good quarrel!”

  They had one. It was one of the loudest I’d ever heard. Terens took Neal and me away to help look after Lewin. He turned out to have broken some ribs when the blast hit the van, but he wouldn’t let anyone look even until I ordered him to. After that, Neal, Alectis, and I sat under our haycart and talked, mostly about the irony of Fate. You see, Neal has always secretly wished Fate had given him Orm as a father, and I’m the one that’s got Orm. Neal’s father is Timas. Alectis says he can see the likeness. We’d both gladly swap. Then Alectis confessed that he’d been hating the Dragonate so much that he was thinking of running away—which is a serious crime. But now the Slavers have come, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a Dragonate anymore, he feels quite different. He admires Lewin.

  Lewin consented to rest while Terens and Mother organized everyone into a makeshift camp in the valley, but he was up and about again the next day, because he said the Slavers were bound to come the day after, when they found the holdings were deserted. The big black she-drake sat in her cave at the head of the kyle, with her infants between her forefeet, watching groups of people rushing around to do what Lewin said, and didn’t seem to mind at all. Huffle said she’d been bored and bad-tempered up to then. We made life interesting. Actually that she-drake reminds me of Mother. Both of them made me give them a faithful report of the battle.

  I don’t think the Slavers knew about the dragons. They just knew that there was a concentration of people in here, and they came straight across the Reserve to get us. As soon as the dragons told Orm they were coming, Lewin had us all out hiding in the hills in their path, except for Mother and Timas and Inga’s mother and a few more who had shotguns. They had to stay and guard the little kids in the camp. The rest of us had any weapon we could find. Neal and Alectis had bows and arrows. Inga had her airgun. Donal and most of the farmers had scythes. The shepherds all had their slingshots. I was in the front with Lewin, because I was supposed to stop the effect of the Slavers’ collars. Orm was there too, although nobody had ever admitted in so many words that Orm might be heg. All Orm did was to ask the dragons to keep back, because we didn’t want them enslaved by those collars.

  And there they came, a huddle of sheeplike troops, and then another huddle, each one being driven by a cluster of kingly Slavers, with crowns and winking V-shaped collars. And there again we all got that horrible guilty compulsion to come and give ourselves up. But I don’t think those collars have any effect on dragons. Half of us were standing up to walk into the Slavers’ arms, and I was ordering them as hard as I could not to, when the dragons smelled those golden crowns and collars. There was no holding them. They just whirred down over our heads and took those Slavers to pieces for the metal. Lewin said, “Ah!” and crumpled his face in a grin like a fiend’s. He’d thought the dragons might do that. I think he may really be a genius, like they say Camerati are. But I was so sick at that, and then again at the sight of nice people like Alectis and Yan killing the sheeplike troops, that I’m not going to talk about it anymore. Terens says I’m not to go when the Slavers come next. Apparently I broadcast the way I was feeling, just like the Slavers do, and even the dragons felt queasy. The she-drake snorted at that. Mother says, “Nonsense. Take travel pills and behave as my daughter should.”

  Anyway, we have found out how to beat the Slavers. We have no idea what is going on in the other of the Ten Worlds, or even in the rest of Sveridge, but there are fifty more Worm Reserves around the world, and Lewin says there must be stray Dragonate units too who might think of using dragons against Slavers. We want to move out and take over some of the farms again soon. The dragons are having far too much fun with the sheep. They keep flying over with woolly bundles dangling from their claws, watched by a gloomy crowd of everyone’s shepherds. “Green dot,” the shepherds say. “The brutes are raiding Hightop now.” They are very annoyed with Orm, because Orm just gives his mad cackle and lets the dragons go on.

  Orm isn’t mad at all. He’s afraid of people knowing he’s heg—he still won’t admit he is. I think that’s why he left Mother and Mother doesn’t admit she was ever married to him. Not that Mother minds. I get the feeling she and Orm understand one another rather well. But Mother married Donal, you see, after Timas. Donal, and Yan too, have both told me that the fact that I’m heg makes no difference to them—but you should see the way they both look at me! I’m not fooled. I don’t blame Orm for being scared stiff Donal would find out he was heg. But I’m not sure I shall ever like Orm, all the same.

  I am putting all this down on what is left of Palino’s memo block. Lewin wanted me to, in case there is still some History yet to come. He has made his official version on the recorder. I’m leaning the block on Huffle’s forefoot. Huffle is my friend now. Leaning on a dragon is the best way to keep warm on a chilly evening like this, when you’re forced to camp out in the Reserve. Huffle is letting Lewin lean on him too, beyond Neal, because Lewin’s ribs still pain him. There is a lot of leaning-space along the side of a dragon. Orm has just stepped across Huffle’s tail, into the light, chortling and rubbing his hands in his most irritating way.

  “Your mother’s on the warpath,” he says. “Oh, I do love a good quarrel!”

  And here comes Mother, ominously upright, and with her arms folded. It’s not Orm she wants. It’s Lewin. “Listen, you,” she says. “What the dickens is the Dragonate thinking of, beheading hegs all these years? They can’t help what they are. And they’re the only people who can stand up to the Thrallers.”

  Orm is cheated of his quarrel. Lewin looked up, crumpled into the most friendly smile. “I do so agree with you,” he said. “I’ve just said so in my report. And I’d have got your daughter off somehow, you know.”

  Orm is cackling like the she-drake’s young ones. Mother’s mouth is open and I really think that, for once in her life, she has no idea what to say.

  Little Dot

  I am lucky enough to own a wizard who talks to me. Henry knows that we cats do not like being taken by surprise. This is how I know all about my early life, when I was much too young to remember.

  Henry lives in an old farm in the hills above Ettmoor and he works three days a week for the Science Institute down in the valley. It is very secret work, he says, because the Government does not want it generally known that they do magical research, but they pay him qu
ite well. Henry is an excellent wizard. But he is far too kindhearted for his own good.

  At the time Henry came into my possession, a young lady—who, even Henry admits, was taking advantage of him horribly—had just moved out of the farm, taking with her all four of her brothers, her mother, and Henry’s prize pigs. The only person left was Henry’s great-aunt Harriet, who lives by herself in the cottage in the yard. Henry was lonely.

  He tried keeping hens for company. He still has these, but all they give him is eggs. (Hens, if you are an innocent town cat, have sharp claws like we do and a very sharp bit on the front of their heads. A cat has to be careful around hens).

  Henry tried to console himself for the sudden quiet emptiness in the farm by buying a CD player and twenty operas, but he was still lonely. He went for long walks. He tells me that the hills are excellent for walking in, and this may be true, but I have never tried it. It always seems to rain when Henry goes walking.

  That particular day it was raining relentlessly, the kind of rain that is mixed up with mist and gets into all your crannies. Henry says he enjoyed it! He tramped along with his beard dripping on his chest, listening to the pattering of drops in the bracken and the gurgling of all the mountain streams, until he came to the place where the path goes over a rocky shoulder and a storm drain goes under the path. Henry says he could hear the drain rushing from a long way off. He thought this was the reason he couldn’t properly hear what the black lady was saying. The water was thundering under the path when he got near. He wondered what an old West Indian woman was doing so far up in the hills, particularly as she seemed quite dry, but she loomed out of the mist so suddenly and she was beckoning him so urgently that he didn’t have time to wonder much.

  He thought she said, “Hurry up, man!” and pointed downward to where the storm drain came off the hill, but he was not sure.

  But he galloped to where she was pointing, where he was just in time to see a tiny sodden slip of fur go sluicing down the drain and vanish under the road. He rushed to the other side of the path and went crashing down the bank, expecting me to come swirling out of the drain any second. In fact, I had caught on a stone about a foot inside the drain. I was buried in yellow frothy bubbles and practically camouflaged. Henry says he would never have found me if I hadn’t had four white feet and one white ear. He plunged to his knees in the water and groped up the pipe until he had hold of me. He says I was frozen. Then he stood up, raining water from knees, elbows, and beard, and shouted up at the black lady, “Here’s the kitten you dropped, madam!”

  There was no sign of the lady. Henry floundered back to the path—with great difficulty, because he had me cupped in both hands and didn’t want to hurt me—and stared into the mist both ways along the path and then up and down the hills, but there was no West Indian woman anywhere. He couldn’t understand it. But he said he couldn’t let that bother him for long, because it was obviously urgent to get me somewhere warm and dry. He ran all the way back to the farm with me.

  There he put me on a towel in front of the kitchen fire and knelt beside me with a saucer of milk. I was old enough to lap, he says, and I had drunk about half the saucerful, when Great-aunt Harriet came in to borrow some sugar. Great-aunt Harriet always opens Henry’s kitchen door by crashing at it with her stick. Henry says this was when I first showed my chief talent. I vanished.

  Henry was most upset. He crawled about, looking under chairs and the hearthrug, and couldn’t think where I’d got to.

  Great-aunt Harriet said, “What are you doing, Henry?”

  “Looking for the kitten,” Henry said—or rather shouted. Great-aunt Harriet is not good at human voices unless they are very loud. Henry went on to shout how he had found me. “And I can’t think,” he bellowed, “how someone can drop a kitten in a drain and then just go away!”

  “Because she wasn’t human probably, and there’s no need to shout,” Great-aunt Harriet replied. “Have you looked in the coal scuttle?”

  Henry looked, and there I was, crouched up and trembling and black all over from the coal. Great-aunt Harriet sank into a chair and watched while Henry wiped the black off me and onto the towel. “What a rag-bag marked little thing!” she said. “You’ll call her Dot, I suppose.”

  I know what Great-aunt Harriet meant. I am all over dots. Somewhere on me I have a dot of every color a cat can have. I have looked in mirrors and Henry has checked. I have silver and gray and tabby, two kinds of ginger and almost-pink, tortoiseshell, Burmese brown, cream, as well as white and black. I have one blue eye in a black patch and one green inside ginger. I am special. But at that time, Henry said, “Dot is a trivial sort of a name, Auntie. A cat should always have a special, impressive name. I shall have to think.”

  “Please yourself,” said Great-aunt Harriet, and began to complain that the hens kept her awake roosting in the coach house on the other side of her bedroom wall.

  Henry hates people complaining. He put one of his operas on to drown Great-aunt Harriet out. This part I dimly remember. There was a lot of singing that I slept through quite happily on Henry’s knee, and then, suddenly, there was this huge human woman’s voice screaming, “Len Iggmy son of Trey, la moor Tay Una!”

  I vanished again like a shot.

  It took Henry and Great-aunt Harriet half an hour to find me. I was behind the big blue-and-white meat dish halfway up the Welsh dresser. We still don’t know how I got there.

  “That settles it,” Henry said. “Her name is Turandot, out of this opera.” He sat me on his left leg and stroked me with one finger while he explained that the screaming woman was a princess called Turandot, singing a song to warn her prince that he would die if he didn’t answer her three riddles. “The words mean: There are three riddles but only one death,” he said.

  So my name is Turandot and I am a princess, but somehow I am nearly always called Little Dot. Some of my chief memories of growing up—apart from chasing wisps of straw and galloping over the shed roofs and tearing up Henry’s work papers and playing with the stuffed mouse Henry bought me—are of sitting on Henry’s knee while he explained how I got my name. He played that screaming woman a lot. And I always vanished. Henry would fish me out from behind the meat dish—and later from under the Welsh dresser and then from inside its cupboard—and sit me on his left knee, and then on both knees when I grew big enough, and explain how I got my name. At night, I slept in his beard, until after about six months he complained that I was throttling him and asked me to sleep on his head instead.

  A few weeks after I started sleeping on Henry’s head, Henry came home with two more cats, one under each arm. They were a dark tabby and a rippled ginger and they were both bigger than me. I was horrified. I was truly hurt. I went bounding up the coach house roof, where I drove the cockerel down and sat in his place with my back to everything, staring down at the moor. Henry came and called to me, but I was too angry and offended to listen. I sat there for hours.

  In the end, Henry climbed on the roof too and sat panting astride it. “Little Dot,” he said, “it’s not my fault. I was in town and I met the black lady again. She was in the garden of an empty house and she called me over. Someone had moved house and left the two cats behind. They were both starving. I had to help them, Little Dot! Do forgive me.”

  It soothed me just a little, that he had come up on the roof to explain, but I couldn’t let him see that. I kept my back to him and twitched my tail.

  “Please, Little Dot!” Henry said. “You’ll always be my first and only cat!”

  “Prove it,” I said. “Send them away again.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “They’ve nowhere to live and you can count their ribs, Little Dot. Let me look after them and I’ll do anything you want.”

  “All right,” I said, and I turned around and nosed his hand. But I didn’t purr.

  Henry said, “Thank God!” and more or less fell off the roof. The noise brought Great-aunt Harriet out of her cottage.

  “I thought
you were that dratted rooster again!” she said. “What a fuss about one little spotted cat! When are you going to build a proper henhouse?”

  “Soon, soon,” Henry said, rolling in the weeds.

  He called those cats Orlando and Cleopatra, would you believe! But they generally answered to Orange and Claws. Claws was a tomcat anyway and Claws suited him better. I made it very clear to them right from the start that it was me who slept on Henry’s head, and I made it equally clear to Henry that I was having my food up on the Welsh dresser in future, not down on the flagstones like an ordinary cat. I wanted him to put two more catflaps in the kitchen door too, so that they wouldn’t sully mine, but he said that one would have to do. He was too busy planning the hen coop Great-aunt Harriet kept asking for to cut holes in doors.

  Orange and Claws and I got on quite well actually. They knew I was the one who really owned Henry. And they had always lived in a town up to then, so they were quite fascinated when I showed them the farm and the hills and warned them to be careful of hens and Great-aunt Harriet’s stick. Great-aunt Harriet always said she had no patience with cats and was liable to prove it by swatting you. Orange went out exploring a lot, while Claws taught me how to catch mice in the sheds. I mean, I knew mice before Claws came, but I hadn’t known you could eat them.

  But Henry just couldn’t seem to stop himself adopting cats. “I seem to have got into the habit,” he said to me apologetically, the day he arrived home from the Scientific Institute with Millamant in a basket. “Don’t mind her. She’s a victim of a mad scientist at the Institute. I sneaked her out of a cage there, and I’m afraid she’s a bit mad herself by now.”