Mark of the Cat and Year of the Rat

  There was a shadow of change in her features also. Her face looked a fraction leaner, wearing small signs of some past struggle. I saw the darkness of a thickening shadow on her upper lip beginning to bracket her mouth and then I was almost startled into some bitter mistake. Before my very eyes, as one would assume a traveler’s cloak, my mistress was drawing on another identity—and this masculine!

  Hynkkel! Why? My grip nearly broke the flute in two. I had seen such shadow masks worn by Ravinga before when she locked herself into deep seeing—but what was so important about this cast-off son of an old army officer, a family which had lost its importance long ago and had with this very son (if rumor spoke true) come to an ignominious ending?

  There was more than the heat of the day walling in the two of us. The fire was of the body, as if my mistress was consumed by some flame of disease. For the first time her hands arose from that limp clasp on the table and moved as if she were pulling towards her something of vast importance. So would a healer—

  I had the flute to my lips, though I still did not send forth its summons to the wandering spirit. This Hynkkel suffered some ill and my mistress was striving to turn it from him!

  Ravinga coughed, her upper body arching a fraction as if that came as a painful stretching. Her hand groped outward as if she sought something she could not see. I caught up a goblet standing to one side, my quick motion disturbing its contents so that the liquid within swirled around and gave off a strong scent of herbs. This I pressed into my mistress’s hold and she, still unseeingly, raised it to her lips and drank. One long draught near emptied the goblet as she swallowed.

  I knew that what she did was not for herself alone and that the medicine which that container held was meant to pass farther in the way of inner healing from her to Hynkkel.

  There was no trace of blood on that thin green robe which was all she wore. Oftentimes a famed and blessed healer could project upon her own body any hurt or wound which marked the one seeking help. No blood—except—she had dropped her left hand once more to her knee and turned the wrist outward to show dark, puffed lines, a wound which might well have gone bad.

  I did not need to be prompted now. This had I done twice before when I had learned how to sever the power of Ravinga. I took the goblet from her. There still remained a mouthful or so of the drug at the very bottom of its bowl.

  My own work slipped unheeded aside, I snatched up a small bit of soft cloth and sopped up that remaining liquor in the cup and then, holding Ravinga’s hand with force against her own knee, as for a moment or so she tried to jerk away from me, I wiped the sodden rag back and forth across the lines of a wound another truly wore.

  Twice Ravinga hissed and attempted to free herself with a jerk but I held on and she could not be free of me. The mark there had been a welt, raised above the skin it disfigured. I was able to feel that upthrust of the very red flesh.

  In my own throat rose the hum which was part of this treatment. My flute I could not use as long as I held the cloth to her arm.

  I vacillated between two opposed beliefs. One that I wrought for good, the other that I sustained what was better left alone. Now the welts were subsiding, even as they paled in color, that dangerous darkness fading.

  Out of nowhere came words I could not translate as I mouthed them. The strange wound on Ravinga’s wrist was being banished. Nor did I believe that it would again threaten my mistress.

  Her skin bore only a scar. I put aside the cloth which I had used. The slender length of the pipe slipped easily through my fingers. I raised the flute to my lips and began to play.

  Nor did I stretch or seek for any notes, rather such came to me, following fast one upon the other as if I unconsciously held to some pattern of music I had once known so well that I need not think on what I played.

  As I played, so that pressure of which I had been so aware eased. Ravinga’s head fell forward on her breast as if she had worn herself out at a task which had been nearly beyond her.

  The flute was quiet. I dropped it from my lips and sat with it between my fingers. Now there was no mark on Ravinga’s right wrist, but the wide bracelet she always wore as a cuff on the left had slipped and beneath it lay a scar—an old one not unlike the one I had seen. Her eyes were closed and she breathed evenly as might one in refreshing slumber.

  I looked down at the cat head which I had been fashioning. The citrine eyes—almost I would swear those were alive! For me there was no explanation of what we two had done. save that Ravinga had carried to its end some ritual of great strength.

  Heat and pain—save that the latter was now less, a lash which fell only lightly across my body to bring back the memory of what I was. I stared straight up. Over me was the night sky. There was the rasp of a great rough tongue across my cheek and I saw that on my right crouched the female Sand Cat. Only her eyes were clearly visible in the night’s dark, but those held me as I strove to lift a hand.

  “Great One.” My voice was a harsh whisper.

  “Friend—” My head ached as if I had spent time striving to make sense out of sounds alien to me. I gave a cry of wonder, for I was sure that this was no dream, that I had indeed sorted intelligible sounds from the noise issuing from that furred throat.

  Only this was a time I could not rise to take in wonders. I was still prisoner to all which had overtaken me when the cat’s teeth had closed upon my wrist.

  But I seemed also to hear a pattern of music I had known so long that it had been a part of me.

  They rose, they fell, those notes, and it was almost as if I saw water falling in droplets as might a trickle poured from a jug into a basin.

  There followed silence at last, and I slept.

  9

  I lay on my back, the folds of my cloak wrinkled about me. The pain had been leached from my wrist. I felt light, content to be where I was. Another dream? No, I was sure that was not so. Certainly I had heard, and understood, moments earlier the exchange between the Sand Cats when the female had gone off and left her mate to play sentry.

  Klaverel-va-Hynkkel—I was him. My eyelids were heavy. It was hard to clear the haze which seemed to wall me in. There was a wind against my desert-dried skin. I blinked at puffs of sand carried by that breeze in arcs against the darker rock. It was a place of desolate loneliness, I thought—for a space—

  “Myrourr—” I twisted my speech as best I could to form that name.

  A lazy, questioning sound answered. The great head lifted from its position on forepaws, and golden eyes surveyed me critically. This was as one might feel on the weapon practice ground of my home isle—just as that huge body of gold-grey fur could have matched the broad shoulders and well-trained body of my father’s marshal at arms.

  I could talk, be understood, be answered. Sometimes it was as if I shared camp with one of my own blood. Death crawled below—there had certainly been no wiping out of all the rats. Still I pushed the thought of these from me for now.

  “—Metkin of Rapper’s Way—” I caught those words clearly. The cat had been doing some inner shifting of my memories.

  “That one was a hero of many battles. On the days of remembering he is called and from him came stories that his clan stood proud of reckoning.” The deep-throated rumble of speech was akin to a purr. “Before him Myart of blood of the Five who fought for the many.” The great cat drew his paw towards him leaving parallel scratches on the rock surface. “Behind that one Maslazar—and others—many others. Myroe—Meester—” He yawned as if reciting these scraps of history brought a need for slumber.

  “And did these heroes company with my kind?” I had to feel my way word by word, unsure as to whether my alien voice could shape these names which held a slurring difficult for me.

  Myrourr’s head moved in the negative, his sleepy eyes half closed.

  “Our clan far from roads of others, Myfford went to death where blow winds of great harshness. He spoke with one living apart, asking for knowledge. Only able to remember a small p
art of that told him. But as was the beginning, so the end.”

  Now his slitted eyes closed. Mine followed, for what he had given me in fragments whirled in and out and made no strict sense. Nor had I any desire to probe the deeper.

  My sleep was a drifting in strange places where there was always one beside me, striving to pressure me to do something, though I slipped aside and evaded easily the control which would have kept me at labor.

  I was aroused at last by another sound, the grate of claws on rock. So I levered myself up on one elbow to see the better. Not too far away was the female cat. And she was not alone. Copying her solemn stance, watching me with the round eyes of inquiring childhood, was a half-grown Sand Cat. Its mouth hung a little open and it was panting.

  Though he was colored like his elders, his spots were more indistinct, his fur was less thick, and his feet oversized as is the case of many cublings. But he gave full promise of equaling his sire in time.

  Maraya, the female, used one paw to urge him forward.

  “Murri—” Her voice was hardly more than a purr. “This one is of our get, smoothskin. As is among your kind we also have a time when the young go forth to learn. Murri will be as a little brother, lifting claw and fang for you.”

  She paused and again I strove with the word sounds of the furred ones.

  “Great lady, do you entrust your cub to me, who am one with those who hunt you?”

  The Great Cats might not laugh but there is humor in them and that colored her answer to me.

  “Entrust him to you, youngling? No, rather we trust you to him.”

  “But—”

  “It is thus, youngling,” Myrourr spoke. “In this place strange things have happened. I lay open to your knife. Yet you took no life, rather worked to save me. We fought side by side, foul things of the inner dark.”

  “And the old one,” Maraya cut in. “You felt for him and did not leave him to the foul ones to worry.”

  “Nor are you any longer what you were,” Myrourr continued. “For in you now is blood of our blood. To our kind you are sealed.”

  I glanced at my wrist. There was a scar there but the wound had closed cleanly. I had heard traveler’s tales that some people afar signed adopted kinship so. But that any had sworn a pact with others than their own species, that had not been told.

  Myrourr and Maraya exchanged a long look. If they communicated so, I could not follow. The male arose, stretched, his huge body nearly as large as that of a bull yaksen. Then he leaped, as lightly as a grain of sand upward borne by the wind, to the top of a rock spur. There he stood, facing outward over the sand beyond the isle, so still he might have been carved from this stone. His head went back and he gave voice to such a roar as might well challenge a storm in fury, once, thrice, and yet again, each time turning a little to face in another direction.

  What he sought I soon learned. Across the distant sands, sometimes so much the color of the land that they could not be detected save that they moved, came Sand Cats in scores beyond my counting.

  There were those as great in size as Myrourr, there were females coming in pride, bringing with them young. All approached the slickrock isle and made their way up it to where Myrourr and Maraya waited with the dignity of rulers among their kind. The visitors touched noses lightly with the two who waited them and then scattered out, forming small family groups, waiting—

  With the coming of dusk they gave tongue. My people have a love of song—the bard is ranked high among us—but this wild music was to no pattern that I knew. Yet the longer it continued the more it sounded right to me, so that I raised my own voice, timidly at first, to join in their ululating wails. There were some who led the singing, perhaps selected the songs. Maraya was one of these and twice all other voices died away allowing hers to echo to the sky, as proud as any challenge.

  Singing was only the beginning. Now they danced. First one and then another leaped upward. By some trick of breathing they were able to draw air into them. Their fur fluffed out until they looked like great soft balls as they leaped and floated for distances I would not have thought possible had I not seen it. They rolled, they twisted, as might cublings at play in the air, as they arose above the crags of the isle.

  Their exertions had another result, for the fur of the airborne ones gave off sparks of light. I watched and I longed, too, to so float in the wind. I could leap, yes, and twist somewhat, but there was no escaping the pull of the earth on my body and I could only stand, panting from my vain efforts, to watch the whirl of the dance. Now those aloft singled out one another and spun together, dipping above or below their partners. Once more they sang. I saw cublings try to climb the sky but with hardly better success than I had had. Twice Murri came to me, short club tail switching, striving to pull me into the midst of the youngsters’ wild circling on the ground.

  I did what I could, for my childhood was not so far behind me that I could not remember certain tricks I had learned from entertainers in the marketplace, somersaults and leaps. My clumsy, probably foolish, efforts appeared to excite Murri and led him to more attempts at soaring, rising to the point where he could circle my ground-bound body.

  Soon I was the center of a circle of cublings and they watched me with unblinking eyes as if I were some marvel. However, I was soon panting heavily and the strength drained from me so at last I seated myself just to watch.

  I was not the only one tiring from that wild revel as more and more of the larger cats touched surface and settled as might kottis before a fire, though their bush tails were too short to curl about the forefeet as did those of our home companions.

  Myrourr and Maraya threaded a way through their resting kin and came to me, to stand one on either side. From Myrourr there came an order that I show this company the mask pendant.

  Straightway when I pulled it into the air it took flame, as if it drew from those about the sparks of fur light. It blazed forth brave as any torch, save there was no heat in it. I held it up so it could be clearly seen.

  For a moment there was complete silence, no scrape of claw on rock, no pant of breath. Then from all that company arose a hum which could be reckoned a great purring—and the sound shook me. They moved in upon me, marshaled as if they were warriors in review before a Queen. Each halted but a moment directly before me, head a little forward as if to sniff at what I bore and then at me. Even though I had shared, in my very small way, their dance and song, I found this a little daunting. To be surrounded by the cublings had been one thing, but to be encircled now by those I had been trained from childhood to consider prime enemies of my kind, awakened uncertainty within me. And still they came.

  It might have been that they wished to store in memory a scent to recall again in times to come. They were accepting me as one of their own, something no one of my species had ever known—at least as far back as our bard songs went.

  For three suns that company remained. The pool algae was shared by all, and there was a determined night hunting for rats. For the first time I witnessed that the Sand Cats would seek those out even in their burrows beneath the surface of the ground. There was a concentrated digging and runways were laid open, nests of the vermin uncovered, those within being speedily taken care of.

  On the third night the first of the gathering began to drift away, followed by more and more. They made no formal farewells to their host and hostess, nor did any of them seek me out.

  During the meeting the cublings had engaged in mock battles of their own with much snarling, hissing, and even flying tufts of hair. Murri rendered good account of himself in two such encounters and his trot took on something of a proud roll when he came to me afterward that I might smooth his fur and hail him as warrior.

  Once the company left and the silence settled once more on the isle, I helped the family sweep the debris of the meeting into deep cracks and fissures. Again I took up scraps of rat hide, softening it from the stiffness of sun drying by pulling it back and forth across the edge of the rock.
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  I could delay no longer. The future I had refused to meet must now be faced squarely. Where I would head when I left the safety of this isle I had no idea. We were not too far, I believed, from that stretch of death-dealing land—the Plain of Desolation. But I still lacked any guide.

  As I worked packing sun-dried pats of algae, more strips of rat meat, whatever I believed I could carry that might mean my life later on, Myrourr came to me.

  “There is a road.” His speech was easier for me to understand the longer I listened. “Masca Broken Tooth said it lies so—” He lifted his head and pointed outward from the isle.

  “Where does it lead?”

  “Who knows?” He made it very clear that the trails of my kind were of little account to a Sand Cat. “But some pass along it. Twice has Masca had good hunting from their beasts. Murri—!”

  He summoned his young son, who squatted before him. I received a jumble of thought impressions and knew that the cub was being instructed by his sire. Since the Sand Cats were lovers of the desert lands, certainly they must possess powers of direction which were more than even the knowledge of our far-ranging patrols.

  When Myrourr had done, Maraya followed with more warnings and instructions, ending that her cub was now to be the comrade and protector of another, and one who was not properly taught.

  How long it might be before we found another such refuge as the one which had served me so well here, I had no idea. The more supplies I could carry with me, the better our chances.

  I made up two packs, one containing my own few belongings and all I could cram into it of the dried food. The second pack was not a heavy one, for neither the algae cakes nor the meat strips were of weight. I enfolded this in a crude covering of skins lashed together and showed it to Murri.

  He backed away, looking at me and uttering sounds of refusal.

  “To travel,” I told him with what authority I could summon, “one must feed. Thus we bear food in case we stray days from new supplies. I can not carry two packs. On the trails comrades share burdens.”