Mark of the Cat and Year of the Rat Read online

  The longest of those dealt with Vapala, and he spoke as if his words were caresses offered to some enshrined lover. These broken pictures he so drew for me were indeed of a land far removed from the rock isles and ever-encroaching sands of my own country. He spoke of countryside covered with growing green which was not always rooted in pools, of scented woods and rich stretches of grass where yaksen and oryxen grazed in peace, where there was no hunger, no fear of storms or failures of the pools which supplied our only chance of life.

  He began to sing and his voice was full. The melody he shaped brought with it a peace I had never known before.

  Perhaps it was his own voice in song which brought him awake, for now his eyes opened and he focused his full sight on me.

  “Of your heart kindness, desert born, let me see the coming of the stars once again.” His desire to do that was very great as he levered himself up with more energy than I thought was left in his wasted body. So I hastened to help him to his favorite place on the roof of his hut and, because he always had it with him when he went so, I also brought his Kifongg to him.

  He smoothed its arched sides back and forth with his hands. Then, with care, he tuned it, until he had tightened the last string and it lay across one bone-thin knee.

  From his chosen place he could look out for limitless distance, if his clouded sight allowed. Now he began to point out the stars.

  “There is Gurpan’s Necklace—and it points to the Tree of Avor. Beyond lies the Gourd of Hinder—Mark them well.” Some of the authority of the teacher returned to his voice.

  “Follow the Sword, desert born—under it lies your fortune—” He hesitated and then actually cackled with a laugh which left him coughing. “Your fortune, yes. There lies Vapala. You have yet a space of the Waste to cross and that will be a testing—but not such a testing as you shall know later.”

  His eyes fell from the stars to me. It seemed that in the dusk they had a hint of glow, if only a hint, to be found in a Sand Cat.

  “I do not seek Vapala.” For at his words there awoke in me an uneasiness which threatened, but why or how I did not understand.

  “Some men do not seek fate, that comes seeking them. Try as you will, desert son, you will discover that Vapala awaits you, twist and turn though you strive to do.”

  Once more he began to sing. Though the words could be understood one by one, their meaning was hidden when he fitted them together:

  “Yellow bright, gold of the sun in glory,

  Black as foul as the breath of death the rats serve their prey.

  Mask of cat, jaw of rat—so shall it be.

  One and two—a hosting of small powers, joined.

  The path is set, the gate is passed—”

  His voice grew weaker, was gone. Then he spoke:

  “We can carry nothing with us when we return to the greatest Essence of all, save what we have made of the gifts, doubts, fears, weaknesses, and strengths with which we came. What we take lies here—and here—” He touched his forehead and then his breast.

  Then he took up the Kifongg with both hands. It might have been a child of his blood, cherished and much beloved, the way he held it. This he offered to me.

  “Take it, desert son, return it whence it came. And say to her who waits, that the meddling is well begun and there is no turning back now.”

  I accepted the harp and then set it aside and took Kynrr into my arms, for he was coughing and from between his lips there dribbled a bead and then a flow of blood. As I eased him back his eyes once more sought the stars.

  “There is a thought—Malquin said it once—that the stars mark other worlds. If that is true then on them men must live and die, be remembered, then forgot. Who was Kaland?” His voice grew stronger on that demand.

  “I have not heard that name.”

  “I have not heard that name,” he mimicked me. “Forgetting comes easily with the passing of seasons. Thus one who stood against the Great Dark has vanished from memory, as so she will, perhaps much faster. I lay this on you, desert son, by the Zancan and the Orb, by the Diamond and the Sword—”

  I could not stop those words and I shivered for I did know what lay upon me now—a geas! And by the old tales the geas of a dying man was a burden no one would willingly receive.

  “Get you to Vapala.” His voice was fading again. “Tell—tell my lady that I have fulfilled my oath—let her see that she does likewise.” His head settled back against my shoulder and there came from his lips a single clean, high note of a song which would never now be sung.

  I was alone with the dead, and upon me lay the burden I could not forestall. Go to Vapala I must.

  14

  There was no escaping the sound throughout the city. The singing of the smaller mobiles was so much a part of our lives that we forgot they existed. But the beat and clash of the Emperor’s seemed to rock the very walls about us. There was no sleep for us this night and Ravinga was putting the time when that usually held us into labor.

  Around the chamber the curtain fell into place and I doubted that the smallest glimmer of lamplight could be sighted without. Yet there were six lamps, three set along each end of the table, and in the brilliance those gave us, not the smallest detail could be hid from notice.

  Ravinga’s fingers twisted and turned, handled needle, small soldering iron, tools so tiny that they were difficult to hold to their work. Beneath her hands the man doll took on shape and substance. As her last client had ordered she was busied with a mortuary doll—one of the Emperor himself.

  To me she had given another task. I had never been set to work with those special chants to be spoken, those gestures to be used as I picked up one of the delicate tools or another. What I fashioned was not a man but a Sand Cat. The kottis of the household sat to one side watching with deep attention.

  I had my guide unrolled on the table before me, each corner of that painted square held down by a carven weight. Those too were things of power. One was a replica of the Blue Leopard such as served always he who was Emperor, one was a yaksen herd cow, proud in the strength which made her guide and leader for her kind, then came a kotti carved of some very dense black stone, glassy smooth to the touch and unusually heavy for its size, the fourth a man doll, whose features were too well set to be aught but a portrait. And a likeness of one I knew—a trader about whom they whispered behind their hands—that he was so lacking in manhood that his own family gave him no proper position—Hynkkel of Kahulawe.

  I was twice as slow as Ravinga, for this was the first time she had set me such a task to be done by myself. It was hot in the shrouded chamber and I slipped out of my overblouse and ran the heel of my hand across my forehead as I concentrated on the miniature Sand Cat.

  Ravinga fastened the last infinitesimal gem into the crown of the doll she worked upon. Then she turned it slowly and critically about.

  Three times had I seen the Emperor close enough to mark well his features. Doll this might be, yet there was so much life caught up by Ravinga’s skill that I would not have been surprised to see him slip down between her fingers and stand alive, his own master.

  She stood him with care upon a block of black stone and then whirled that around with an impatient gesture so now he faced me.

  “It is well?” and she meant that question to be truthfully answered. In all the years I had seen her as another pair of hands I had never before been asked my opinion of her work.

  “By all I know, mistress,” I replied quickly, “this is in truth an image of Haban-ji.”

  Now her one hand gestured but the other kept still a jealous guard between her and her masterwork.

  I glanced down at what I myself had wrought. It, too, had a lifelike air to it. Almost I could feel this image looking at me measuringly as if it were indeed true one of the great menaces of our land.

  “Call!” commanded my mistress.

  I wet lips, desert dry, with my tongue tip, lowering my head so that my eyes were on a level with that of one image.<
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  “Hynkkel,” I named the name of the doll which stood to my right hand anchoring the cloth. “Desert warrior—”

  The yellow eyes did not change. There was no sound of an answer—had I expected such? Using one of the small tools I still held as a pointer, I spoke again, quietly but not allowing myself to be denied.

  “Enter!”

  It was the desert cat, stretching as might one of the kottis—its front legs spread outward, its hind quarters stiff, again as a kotti before padding out on a nighttime prowl. It moved from the center of the cloth and there was something lightsome about its fur which matched a bit of the ancient markings on the skin it had rested upon as I worked.

  Ravinga was not through with either it or me. Once more she turned the figure of the Emperor Haban-ji, now to face the beast I had wrought.

  She had whipped up from behind her a length of fine silk embroidered with silver leopards and swung that swatch about the Emperor doll, hiding it from view. I had no more the feeling that the doll was what he seemed—that which had been life in him had departed.

  The same was not so of the cat. Its head turned as it looked to the image of Hynkkel. One could believe that there passed between them some spark of communication. Ravinga reached forth across the table and caught up that miniature of the Kahulawen.

  She put him down beside the cat and eyed the pair narrowly as if she was searching for one small error in craftsmanship.

  Then again she gave her order in a single word:

  “Speak!”

  “Hynkkel,” I obeyed. I was still and tense, disliking this thing that was not of my willing. She had taken me, I saw clearly over the years, to establish her will, overriding mine. This carried the bite of old anger. Yet she never appeared to sense that I was not one of her tools, to be discarded at will and reused again at a whim.

  I saw the thin shadow of a smile about her lips. Whatever game she played Ravinga surely believed that she had it under her full control.

  Long back during the years I had spent with Ravinga I had learned that there was a time one did not ask questions. What she did in the privacy of the back of her shop was secret and often I never knew what it was. I studied her now with some of the same old unvoiced demand as she was turning on the doll Hynkkel and the Sand Cat I had wrought. The heat of the room was more oppressive. I did not believe that she felt it.

  Then putting man image and beast one together in the middle of the table, she brought forward the wrapped replica of the Emperor.

  Opening up the small box of minute gems, from which she could reproduce in miniature the heavy jewelry of state, she thrust the end of her most delicate tool into the massed bits of color and then lifted it out, a thread of chain dangling from it. Pendant from that was a tiny mate to that cat mask which she had given to the feckless young man at the trading square almost a quarter of a season back.

  She dropped the circlet of that thread-thin chain over the manikin’s head and sat him, so adorned, to face the Emperor, whom she had unwrapped. Game—this was some game. Bits and pieces I had witnessed, words overheard here and there, they drew together in my mind.

  The old puzzle was at the root of it. Who—what was Ravinga? She made no parade of any arts beyond what anyone might see: her use as a maker of dolls. Yet there was much more—very much more.

  I had come to her not with any real hope drawing me to her household. For nightmare days and demon-ridden nights I had been hunted. And I knew just how much I was worth to any astute enough to break my disguise and spy me out.

  When I was very small I had made a great discovery for myself. If I believed myself unseen, undetected, then it appeared that was the truth. First my nursemaid, and then old Vastar, my tutor in things suitable for a maiden of any House, could pass within touching distance and yet see me not.

  Because I was a child in a household of adults, and ancient adults—the lady ruler being my grandmother twice over—I went much my own way.

  Six Houses ruled Vapala and, through the Emperor and their support of him, they ruled our whole known world. Not outwardly, but in devious ways of their own. I was sure that the very deviousness of their dealings with each other gave them a cold yet intense pleasure.

  Below the six, there were the twelve. More ambitious these, and more active outwardly, for they yearned to see their House standard set as near to the square before the palace of the rulers as possible. They had promise of gaining such heights. It had been done so far three times in our slow-moving history.

  The twenty and five came next. And they were the doers, those who fought more openly for place. Among them it was not unusual for the Head of a House to challenge an equal, knowing that survivors in such a constant hidden war were the winners. These hunted for unusual powers and sought out knowledge long since forgotten.

  There had been one such House lady under the banner of my line, and she had set herself up against the ruler of her own House, dooming it to extinction. I was nameless and clanless. No one in the whole of Vapala had so before brought to naught as old and mighty a House.

  Ravinga bore a twisted scar across her shoulder which she ever concealed with a scarf. That brand I owed her recompense for.

  From the first she gave me an established position in Vapala. Having declared before the council that I was her chosen apprentice, I was removed from the wreckage of the House and even out of the ranks of the nobility, which did not bother me in the least.

  My education was strict and I was put to learning things which a year or so earlier I would have argued did not exist. I discovered that, just as within the Houses there are intrigues, so did veiled action continue elsewhere, not only in Vapala but in all the queendoms. It was very much a matter of not accepting the surface but relying on one’s knowledge of what lay below.

  Now it would appear that my education was to be furthered. Ravinga planted her elbows together on the table and cupped her chin in the palms of her hands, her attention now on the two images, man and cat.

  “Last season,” she began abruptly, “there came one from Azhengir, a trader of salt, the one I told you afterward to keep well in mind.”

  I remembered clearly the woman she meant, hard as a lump of her own dusky wares, her skin dried and chapped, her eyes buried in protecting wrinkles raised against the shifting, smarting dust of her country. She had walked into Ravinga’s shop with the sure tread of an expected visitor, though I had never seen her before.

  Once inside she had done an unusual thing, dropping the heavy butt of her traveler’s staff against the door so that it denied entrance to any following her.

  She had shrugged off her pack, giving a wheezing cough as she set it down.

  Then as if she had seen Ravinga only an hour before, she said:

  “I’ve come—the waiting is done with.” She had made a gesture before her breast as if tracing some symbol there. A twitch of the rope which fastened her backpack together followed and the hide cover, rimmed with crystals of salt, opened stiffly.

  My hand had gone for my knife and then a moment later I knew that no active defense was needed. The thing crouched stiffly within her pack was truly dead.

  Much of the body was gone, showing a lattice of bones, but the head, frozen in a snarl, was still intact. I have many times seen the bodies of sand rats, had even fought against them and had drops of their dark, sour blood eat into my flesh. But this dead creature was many times larger than the only ones of its kind I had ever seen.

  Also the skull was misshapen with a high dome of forehead as if to give room to a man’s bulk of brain.

  “I see.” Ravinga made no attempt to draw closer to the displayed creature. “This came from whence?”

  “Our caravan was attacked just at the border of the Plain. And there were four such as this which kept its fellows at battle to the end. Since the Fire Dawn there have been no changes in men or beast—though they tell us that before that time there were such unchancy things. The winds blow, the storms strike, caravans a
re lost, our kind dies for one reason or another. Why else were we given wardenship of the Waste in the far times but that we watch for such?”

  Ravinga shook her head. She spread her hands wide as if she would measure something invisible to us. “What do I know, Bissa?”

  The woman showed her crooked teeth. “Ask rather what you do not, Voice. But the time grows short, I think. I have heard that the Emperor fails.”

  Ravinga nodded.

  “How long since we have had a Watchment for the ruling? Perhaps we should ask that?”

  “There is no way of influencing the choice.”

  “They tell us that the Emperor must be the Essence of our countries if we would stand tall, unbroken. And the people have some rights—”

  Ravinga’s eyes had narrowed then and she had spoken coldly. “They need demand no answers from me. I am only a watcher—”

  “See that you be more when the time comes,” the other had answered and began to rewrap her package.

  Ravinga had spoken once more. “For the time there is no one we can appeal to. Watcher, that I am, yes. And perhaps can be more when the time comes.” But the woman had picked up her burden and gone quickly without glancing at the dollmaker again. Nor, to my knowledge, had she ever returned. And surely Ravinga had never mentioned her again.

  “What would she have you do?” I asked, daring as I never had before.

  Ravinga shrugged. “Perhaps she herself could not have said. One cannot fight mist and shadows with steel of knife or spear. However, the seasons have turned, Haban-ji is dead, and now we must look to another. He comes, oh, yes, he comes! There shall be changes in plenty.” She picked up a strip of crimson silk and tore it in two with jerks, wrapping half about the man and the other half about the Sand Cat. I needed no spoken word of hers to dismiss me.

  15