CHAPTER 20
Cat heard a strangled noise coming from her right. She turned and saw that Guy had started up. He was staring at the newcomer as if he was seeing a ghost, his own face ghastly white in the gloom of the dusk.
Then several things happened at once. The newcomer, too, had heard Guy’s cry and turned towards its source, and his face suddenly broke into an enormous, lopsided grin. He cried Guy’s name and sprang forward to embrace him, dropping the bowl in his hand on the soft ground; Guy jumped forward as well, and the two collided, throwing their arms around each other in a tremendous hug. The sudden movement was too much for Guy’s leg; he cried out in pain and lost his balance, pulling the other with him, which made him step backwards onto the bowl on the ground, cracking it in two. With all the commotion, Bibby was startled awake and began to cry.
“Shushush!” Cat tried to calm her. The attention of the two men turned to the woman and the baby. The newcomer helped Guy regain his balance, let go of his arm, and took a step closer. He peered at the little girl and broke into his brilliant smile again.
“Bibby, Karana! Hello!” he said to her. (That name again!) She stopped crying almost immediately, and peered back at him. Then she smiled her sweet baby smile.
“Uncayepp!” she said, turning her face up at Cat’s to see how she felt about it.
Cat looked from one pair of brilliantly turquoise eyes to the other, then to Guy, who stood clutching his knee, but nonetheless smiling as broadly (and lopsidedly) as the other. The only thing she had left to wonder was why she had not made the connection before. How many pairs of turquoise eyes could there be in the world—even in a foreign, magical one? She felt an answering smile spreading over her face.
“The Septimissimus, I presume?” she said.
The newcomer, whose resemblance to Guy ended with his smile and eye colour, nodded at her. He was easily half a head shorter than his brother, his hair very dark, nearly black, and his build solid rather than slender. Cat thought there was room for excuses here—they hardly looked like brothers at all, definitely not at first glance.
“And you are Cat,” he said.
Then Sepp turned to Guy, with a look of urgency on his face.
“Guy! Guy, she’s there.”
“What?” Guy seemed as confused as Cat felt.
“She’s there! The place I just came from, where she came from”—he looked towards Cat, then back at his brother. “Ashya is there. She is not dead, Guy. She lives.”
Confusion, hope, and something undefinable chased each other over Guy’s face.
“You’ve seen her?”
“Seen her, spoken with her—and stolen her bowl.” Sepp turned around to where the pieces of bowl lay on the ground. It was getting to be hard to see, but they could just make it out. It had cracked in two uneven pieces. He peered at it in the dark.
“Hmm, just like the other one,” he said.
“What other one?” Cat stood up from her rock, Bibby still in her arms.
“The one that must have brought you here,” he replied. “Here, do you want me to take her?” He reached out his arms for the little girl.
Bibby shook her head and snuggled deeper into Cat’s arms, reaching her little arms up around Cat’s neck and squeezing tight. Cat tried not to show on her face how smug this made her feel. She wrapped her arms tighter around the warm little body and hugged her close.
“Huh, is that the way it is?” said Sepp, and looked at his brother with one eyebrow quirked up. For the first time he really seemed to notice Guy’s awkward stance, and his painful rubbing at his injured leg.
“What have you done to yourself this time?” he asked.
“Slipped in the clay pit,” Guy replied briefly. “Let’s go home. We can talk about it there.”
It was almost entirely dark by the time they were back at the cottage. It had taken them quite a bit longer than before to make their way along the path; Guy’s leg was sore enough that he needed to lean on his brother for most of the way and rest once or twice, and Cat was finding Bibby ever heavier to carry the farther they went. The heavy weight of the little girl’s head on her shoulder told her she had dropped off to sleep again.
The fire in the cottage was still burning gently, the logs nearly spent. With a relieved groan, Guy sank into the chair by the table and propped his left foot up on the bench.
“Feed the fire, young’un,” he commanded, “and light us a light!”
“I hear and obey, oh ancient one!” mocked his brother, the words clearly an old ritual between them. He put the pot shards he had been carrying on the table, then took a log from the stack beside the fireplace and dropped it on top of the embers in the hearth. “Where are the spills?”
“Jar, by the lights,” Guy replied, gesturing at a pottery cup on the mantelpiece filled with something that looked like wooden skewers standing on end.
Sepp took one of the skinny sticks, lit its end in the fire, and brought the flame up to the candles above the hearth. He carried one of the candles over to the table and noticed the brown teapot in the centre. He lifted it up and swirled it to test for contents.
“Any mintbrew left?”
“I don’t think so,” Guy replied. “Make some more?”
“Oh, yes, please,” said Cat, who was tucking the sleeping baby into Guy’s bed. She rubbed her arms and shivered just a bit. “I could use some hot t—mintbrew.”
“Tea, you call it, don’t you?” Sepp asked. “Or that’s what Nicky says.”
Cat’s head shot up.
“You’ve met Nicky?!?”
“Oh yes!” he replied feelingly. “Met her, spent the night at her rooms, got these from her…” He gestured at the clothes he wore. In the light of the candles, Cat saw that what he had on was a white Nike t-shirt, dark, snug-fitting jeans with a button fly, and black-and-white high-top runners with loose laces.
“Oh, I thought I’d seen that outfit before! Didn’t that belong to—” She clapped her hand over her mouth. Very tactful, Cat.
“Uh, yes. I understand it belonged to a previous ‘boy friend’, who left it behind when he moved out?”
Guy’s eyebrows were vying for space with his hairline, as he looked from one of them to the other. Sepp grinned at him.
“They have rather different ways of doing things in that place,” he said to his brother.
Cat slid onto the back bench between the table and wall, planted her elbows on the bare wood surface, put her chin on her fists, and gave Sepp a stern look.
“So, talk!” she commanded. “And start at the beginning. I’m tired of people throwing random bits of information at me that make no sense.”
The brothers exchanged a glance, and Guy’s mouth twitched up at the corner the tiniest bit.
“You had better do as she says,” he recommended. Sepp finished with the kettle by the fire, and now came over to the table with the filled teapot and some mugs.
“What’s the beginning?” he asked, straddling the front bench beside Guy’s propped-up foot. “When I met you? When I left here?” He poured the tea into the mugs and pushed one across the table to Cat. It bumped into the pot shards lying between them. In the light of the candle, the glaze showed as a dull rusty brown. Sepp picked up one of the pieces and fingered it thoughtfully.
“I suppose the beginning is those bowls,” he said. He looked at Guy. “Have you found out what does it?”
Guy shook his head, his lips pressed together.
“Well, it’s a strange thing,” Sepp said, “everything goes into a swirl, sort of spinning around you in circles—”
“Yes!” cried Cat, “That’s just what happened to me!”
“But you didn’t even touch it, did you?” asked Guy.
“Well, now that I think of it, I guess my hair touched it when I bent over to look at it, sort of brushed against it. But you must have had it in your hands, didn’t you?” she asked Sepp.
“Yes, and I still did when I, well, landed, so to speak.” He turned to Guy agai
n. “Everything sort of whirls around you, and when it settles out and stops spinning, you are someplace else. So far, each time I’ve landed on my backside. Not very dignified.” He laughed and rubbed his tailbone.
Cat chuckled.
“Yes, me too, except I’ve only done it once, so far. So where did you end up landing?”
“I came out in this little grassy area, beside that large building. The musean, I think?”
“Museum,” Cat automatically corrected. “So you’ve been around the Sammelhauser the whole time?”
“Yes—well, no—yes, until I saw you, and then you disappeared again, and—”
“Stop! One thing at a time. So you landed beside the museum, with the bowl still in your hand. This bowl?” She pointed to the broken shards on the table.
“No. No, the one that you looked at. This one is the one that—oh, all right, all right, one step at a time!” He grinned at Cat’s stern look. “But you keep interrupting!”
Chastened, Cat smiled back.
“Okay, I’ll shut up. Tell your story. You landed beside the museum…”
“Yes. It’s tremendously large, Guy, and built entirely of brick! Uncle Ardross would love to get a look at that! They’re going way higher with their buildings there than two floors.”
Cat opened her mouth to comment, then shut it again with an audible snap. Sepp looked at her and winked.
“As I was saying,” he continued, “this tremendous building was in front of me. But other than that, once my head stopped spinning, I thought I had just landed someplace else in Isachang—in the capitol, perhaps (I’ve always wanted to see it). You see, just around the corner, there was a market—just like ours, here. Or I thought it was, at first. Most people were dressed normally, like this,” he gestured at the clothes Guy and Cat were wearing, “although some were in really bright colours, and odd styles, but I thought that was city fashions. They had a hand-to-hand fighting arena, like the jousts we heard about, Guy, and stalls where they sold things. Some food, and clothes, leather goods—there was even a potter. I wandered around, looking at the stalls. I was trying to determine just where I was, so I struck up conversations with some of the stallholders. They seemed to like my clothes, and several said I was ‘really in character’, whatever they meant by that…”
Cat had listened to this with a puzzled frown on her face, but now her brows cleared.
“The Renaissance Fair!” she said, striking her forehead with the heel of her hand. “I forgot they had that there last weekend! Is that where you met Nicky?” She turned to Sepp, who frowned at her teasingly. “Oops, sorry! Shutting up again!”
“As you say, the whatever-you-said Fair. Nicky seems quite excited about those. No, that’s not where I met her. And yes, before you ask, I still had the bowl. No, not this bowl, the other bowl. And no, it didn’t look like this, it looked different. And no—”
Cat punched him lightly on the arm.
“Cut it out!” she told him. (She wondered at herself, how easily she had fallen into treating them as if they were her brothers. She had never had brothers. Brothers? Did Guy feel like a brother? Cat pushed the thought aside. There was a story to hear.)
“Well,” he continued, “there isn’t that much to tell after that. I met some people, around the jousting arena, who seemed to think I belonged to another part of their group. They shared their food and even let me sleep in their tent. At that point I still thought it was all a great adventure—I was so glad to be away from here, then.” He sent a look of silent apology at his brother. “It was a while into the next day before I saw that the place I had landed in was different from here—very different.”
“No kidding,” Cat said quietly under her breath.
“I was beginning to wonder what had happened, and how I could get back. I tried all sorts of things with that bowl—yes, I was coming to that. I think the silliest was when I tried to wear it as a hat; by that time I was getting desperate. (It wasn’t a good fit as a hat; I gave that up fairly quickly.) Around that time they were breaking up the market on Sunday. You see, the bowl—it had not changed at all then, it looked just as it had when I first picked it up, here, with the blue and green glaze. I thought it could just take me back the way we came.
“But it didn’t. It did nothing. Some of my companions from the fair let me sleep in their caravan with them that night—their caravans, their carriages, Guy, they're amazing!—and then they left the next day. I had long realised by then that this was not real for them, that the market was just some people playing at something they are not. And I knew that something else had to happen, that there had to be another way home.
“So I was hanging around the musean—museum—searching, trying. I’ll spare you the account; the bowl on my head was not the worst.
“But, finally, I saw you.” He looked at Cat. “You got out of the big carriage (the bus, Nicky called it?), and I knew you would be my way back. Are you an Unissima, by chance?”
Cat was taken aback. That again!
“I don’t—people keep saying that—well, maybe.” She thought of how she had known where to find Guy in the forest. “What does that have to do with it?”
“If you are, that would explain why I knew it was you. You know how Aunt’s Knowing sometimes spills over onto the people she is with?” he asked Guy, who nodded. “It was like that. I just knew.”
“Well, you freaked me out pretty good, staring at me like that! I felt like I was being stalked!”
“I’m sorry about that. But I had to. I had to get you to the bowl, make you look at it—well, I thought you would have to touch it, but you didn’t after all. I put it in that case, with the ugly frog, and then I—sorry, I stalked you.
“It actually took a little bit for you to notice me—I think there were about two rooms where you just would not look up; you were so fascinated with the things in the cases. But when you did, thank goodness it was close enough to the room with the bowl. I followed you there, but tried to stay back so you would not be frightened enough to run away entirely.
“And I just saw you, bending down to look at the bowl, then closer—and then you were gone. Just like that.”
Guy made an inarticulate noise.
Sepp gave him a questioning look, and continued. “I ran over the rest of the way. But there was no sign of you, anywhere. And the bowl—the bowl looked like this.” He pointed to the shards on the table. “See how it’s gone this rusty brown? The same.
“I kept looking around for you, but the only sign that was left of you was your satchel.”
“My purse! You found my purse?”
“Yes, I did. I picked it up, and I kept looking around for you, back through all the rooms, all around. I forgot I was carrying your satchel in my hand, and I was just stepping outside through the big doors, when your bag started singing.”