CHAPTER 9
Cat was following Ouska along the forest path, the older woman carrying the baby. They had left Guy with his uncle, with buckets of water, soap, towels, medicines, bandages, and a pot of soup.
“They’ll do,” Ouska had said, “and you look like you might want a wash yourself. Come on, there’s warm water at my house.”
Warm water? That sounded heavenly. Cat hurried after the older woman. The skirt she was wearing was longer than her blue and green hippie skirt; this one almost came down to her ankles. Cat was clutching it in her left hand, trying the raise the hem a bit; she kept feeling like she would trip on it, and she wanted to see where she was putting her feet. She had put on her dirty slip-ons again; Guy might have kept his wife’s clothing (for whatever reason), but there weren’t any shoes to fit Cat in the cottage. Her ballerina flats were not exactly made for walking on a forest floor; Cat could feel most of the rocks and roots through her soles. That wife of Guy’s—she wondered what had happened to her. Ouska certainly seemed to have little respect for the woman’s memory, judging by the tone of her voice every time she spoke of her.
The forest path was widening and smoothing out after a few minutes’ walking, so the women could walk side by side.
“So, Ouska,” said Cat, “you started telling me, but I’ve already forgotten. The forest is called Roos?”
“Ruph. The Wald of Ruph. So’s the village. The county is Samach, our country Isachang.” Ouska shifted the toddler to her other hip. “When you came, did you stop right by the clay pit?”
“No, I was around in the corner, in the forest. There was some kind of enclosure, like a cage made of tree branches, but I didn’t really look at it. I was too freaked out.” It was odd that she could speak with the people in this place the way she would talk at home, back on twenty-first-century Earth. Somehow, with the rustic surroundings and the way they were dressed, you would expect that the people here would be using “thee” and “thou” and “speakest” and “sayeth.” But they didn’t; they sounded normal. Or perhaps they were using all that fancy language, and she just heard their talk as if it was the same as hers? Maybe the air in this place had built-in translators. Software air.
“Ouska?”
“Yes, child?” Cat was twenty-eight—hardly a child any more. But somehow she did not mind being called that by this woman; it seemed to fit. Besides, it was better than the appellations Ouska bestowed on Guy—Cat would much rather be referred to as “child” than as “young fool.”
“Ouska—” (now, how could she put this question?) “Ouska, is this place, this country, this—this world—is it magical?”
The woman gave her a surprised look.
“Magical? I wouldn’t say that.”
(“Ma’cal, ma’cal,” Bibby sang, riding along on Ouska’s hip.)
“But, you see,” Cat tried to explain, “I felt things. I mean, first of all, there is that way I was brought here, in one big swoop. There’s nothing I did or could have done about it—one minute I was looking at the bowl, and the next I was in the forest. What’s that all about? And then, I touched a tree, and it’s like I got an electric shock or something…”
“Ah, is that what it was?” said Ouska, with the air of someone who just had a mystery cleared up.
“What what was?”
“I felt that something happened, it must have been right at that moment. I knew it had to do with Bibby; that’s why I came looking for her. An Unissima feels what happens to other females more strongly than to males, else I’d have known it had to do with the boy.”
‘The boy?’ Oh, Cat supposed she meant Guy. She smiled to herself. ‘Boy’—he looked to her like he was close to thirty.
“But, don’t you see, right there, that Unissima thing. You just know things, feel them in your bones or something? That sounds magical to me.”
“Oh, well, that. I suppose you could call it magical, if you will. We have our powers, of course. Don’t you have them in your world?”
“Powers? No, I don’t think so—unless you mean electricity or whatever.”
“I never heard of what that might be. No, I mean personal powers—the ability to make things work. A person’s gift that works itself out in what they touch or what they do. For us Unissimae, it’s knowing things, generally things about people. I still think you are one of them, too, although perhaps you have not come into your powers yet. Is your mother still living?”
“My mother? What—no, I don’t think so. I don’t know, to be honest. What’s she got to do with it?”
“How old would she be if she was alive?”
“I’m not sure,” said Cat, slightly confused. “I think she was quite young when I was born, eighteen or nineteen, so she’d be somewhere in her forties now. She took off when I was two; my grandmother raised me. Why?”
“Your mother left when you were a babe?” Ouska gave her another sidelong, probing glance. “Just like this little one here.” She gave Bibby a quick bounce on her hip, which made the little girl giggle. “Well, you see, as I told you, an Unissima is an only daughter of an only daughter. She doesn’t come into her powers until it’s certain her mother won’t have any other children. For me, it was when my mother died; I was twenty-two years old. Her mother” (she tipped her head at Bibby) “was just fourteen when her mother went through the change; she was a late-in-life babe and spoiled rotten for it. She was just the right age to be foolish about the Knowing—too old to have become accustomed to it from the start, as Bibby here will, and too young to have any sense of what a gift like that means.”
“So what happened? I thought you said she left—or did she die? ‘Cause otherwise how would Bibby have her powers?”
“That I don’t know. The woman disappeared one day about a year ago; that’s all we heard. The boy won’t say what went down, won’t speak of her at all. But he was left holding the babe, literally. And a few months later, the little one showed signs of Knowing. And she couldn’t, not if her mother was still—but yet, my own Knowing tells me the woman’s not dead.”
Just then, a tabby cat scooted across the path in front of them.
“Gah!” cried Bibby with a big smile, pointing at the animal.
“There!” said Cat. “I meant to ask you about that. That’s what she calls me, Gah, and has done so from almost the first moment she laid eyes on me. Does she know my name?”
“Seems that way, doesn’t it? The Knowing doesn’t necessarily mean she can say things properly.” The women laughed. “If your own mother might still be alive and isn’t past the change yet, perhaps that’s why you haven’t got the Knowing yet. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters through her mother, did she, though?”
“No,” said Cat thoughtfully, “none that I know of. But—but I don’t think in my world, we have Unissimas, or whatever that’s called. People are just, you know, people. Some are really good at things, but most are just, well, ordinary. Like me,” she added in a quiet voice.
“Hmph.” Ouska snorted. “You’re no ordinary one, girl, let me tell you. She knows that, don’t you, pumpkin.” She ruffled Bibby’s feathery curls.
Cat looked down, embarrassed. She was not used to having someone read her soul, and even though Ouska was doing it in the kindest possible manner, it was still disconcerting. Her eyes fell on her bandaged hand.
“Ouska?” She turned her head sideways, looking at the older woman’s profile as she walked beside her. “You said that you have your powers. Do all of you have them? I mean, does everyone here have some kind of, I don’t know, special ability? Like mind reading—well, okay, the Knowing—”
“Hold hard, girl—I can’t read minds. And neither can Bibby here, even though she’s Unissima Maxima (she’s the daughter of an Unissima, which makes her doubly strong in the Knowing). Nobody can. The Knowing—it’s just, well, knowing things that others don’t. As if someone had told you in your ear. When you touched that tree, it sent a surge along that reached me almost immediately; the Knowing said to me,
‘There’s something happened in the Wald, and it’s to do with the little one.’ I’ve learned to my cost not to ignore that voice, so I set out, and found you, and her, and him—and here we are.”
‘Here’ turned out to be the first few houses of the village. Cat was rather surprised. They looked much more prosperous, and far less rustic, than Guy’s cottage in the forest clearing. Half-timbering predominated, filled with whitewashed wattle and daub or perhaps stonework; the roofs were shingled with wood which had weathered to a soft grey colour on most houses. Many of the small-paned windows had exterior sills with pots of blooming flowers or herbs on them, and wooden shutters were ready to be closed against nightfall.
The forest track became a hard-packed dirt road. Ouska turned right at the first house and pushed down the iron door latch on the solid-looking, closely jointed wooden door. They stepped into a kitchen, its floor laid with blue and brown ceramic tiles. A heavy wooden table with benches on either side of it stood in the middle; Welsh dressers occupied the spaces on either side of the window. Against the far wall was a fireplace, but unlike the open hearth in the cottage, this was enclosed with black cast-iron doors, like a wood stove built into the wall. Above the fire was something that looked like a large, enamelled tank; to the left of the fireplace, a sink with a pump attached to it. Indoor running water! Things were looking up.
Ouska put Bibby down on one of the benches, from which the little girl promptly slid down.
“Kiki!” she demanded.
“I don’t know where kitty is,” said Ouska. “Let’s get her a saucer of milk, maybe she’ll come.” She took a shallow pottery dish from one of the dressers, glazed in the same brown as the dishes in Guy’s cottage. Another unglazed jug, sitting in a dish of water and covered with cheesecloth, proved to be a milk pitcher. Ah, thought Cat, the water acts as an evaporation cooler! Smart. Ouska put the dish on the ground, poured a little of the milk into it, and told Bibby to call the kitty.
“Kiki, kiki!”
“No, like this: psspsspsspsspss!” The older woman hissed out a sharp call. Immediately there came a soft thump from the room next to the kitchen, and around the open door a beautiful little calico cat padded into view.
“Mrreow?” she said.
“Kiki!” squealed the baby, and pounced on the cat. The cat easily eluded her, padded over to the saucer, and settled down to lap at her treat, completely ignoring the little girl’s happily patting her and pulling her tail.
“Now, Catriona, you’ll want a wash,” said Ouska, opening a door to the right of the fireplace. Cat followed her through into a small room that backed on to the kitchen. It was a bathroom! A full-fledged, regular bathroom. The fixtures looked different from what Cat was used to, but they were easily recognised as a washbasin and a tub—the latter with a spout coming directly off the big tank that was mounted above the fireplace on the kitchen side. Running hot water! Cat had never expected this. Ouska walked through another door on the other side of the bathroom and came back with a collection of linen.
“Here’s a towel.” She handed Cat a thick, white woven sheet. “And you’ll want to put that blouse and skirt back on after; mine would be too wide and short for you. But you can have some of my underlinen; the drawers have a pull string, and the shift is loose anyway.” She put the garments on the edge of the washbasin, then turned the tap on the water pipe to send warm water gushing into the round wooden tub. “When you’re finished, just pull out the stopper” (she indicated something like a cork on the inside bottom edge of the tub). “It goes into a barrel out back. We use it to water the garden.” Ah, greywater collection—they were certainly environmentally friendly in this place. “Oh, and here’s a piece of soap.”
Cat climbed into the tub, which was just big enough for her to sit in with her knees drawn up under her chin and have the water come all the way up under her arms. A hot sitz bath. Bliss.
Getting into the water made her suddenly notice that she had forgotten to take the bandage off her hand—in fact, she had forgotten about her hand being sore altogether. She had just used it as if nothing had happened. Puzzled, she unwound the cloth and wiggled her fingers. There was no sign of bruising, no evidence that only a few hours earlier she had wondered if every bone in that hand had been cracked.
She sank down into the warm water and let it soothe the kinks out of her body.