Cat Tales (3 page)

"I told you it was the same kind of gift,"
Bek said. "I thank you. That was well chosen, and well done. We can
discuss your fee, gleeman, when we rise. I do not often entertain
visitors, but I have readied a pallet here by the fire for you. I
hope you will find it comfortable."

"Thank you. I am sure I shall. But as to the
fee…"

Bek raised a hand for silence. "All in its
time," he said, "although here we do have the luxury of choosing
our moment… For now, I wish you a good rest and a pleasant night.
You may dream, in this room. Pay it no mind." He chuckled. "It is
just a little bit of… magic." Again, the word was emphasized with
an unspoken smile. "I think I do not have to warn you to touch
nothing here that you do not begin to understand… ah… perhaps it is
safer to touch nothing at all, then, if magic is your bane."

He saw Aris flinch, and his face assumed a
contrite expression.

"I do apologize," he said, " I have
absolutely no intention of plaguing your rest with fear or anxiety.
Rest easy – what is here, is mine, and will not harm you."

Aris bowed. "It would be ungracious to find
fault with sanctuary," he said. "I owe you."

"No," Bek said. "It is I who am in your
debt."

He bowed lightly, vanishing behind another
curtain, twin to the one through which they had entered the room
from outside and blowing out one bank of candles on his way out..
Aris doused the rest, put away the harp, and settled onto the
comfortable sleeping pallet, piled high with furs, which had been
provided for him. But sleep was elusive, especially after one of
the armchair cats decided to leave its companions in favor of the
furs of the pallet and curl up, purring imperiously, against the
pallet's occupant. The room was palpably benign, to one as
sensitive to atmosphere as a trained gleeman was, but there was
something about it that made Aris's hair stand on end even so,
especially in the deep silence of the night shadows. Not even the
comforting, anchoring presence of the cat helped. Something was
brushing along the edges of his mind, lightly, and would not let
him rest. His fingers ached for his harp – inconveniently, for he
could hardly take up the instrument and start improvising on it
while his host was asleep in the next chamber. So he lay back with
wide-open eyes, wakeful and worried, his thoughts in curious chaos,
until his body rebelled and presented him with a violent cramp in
his leg. He kicked, dislodging the disgruntled cat, and rose to his
feet.

Mindful of the injunction not to touch
anything he nevertheless embarked on a quick wander around the
room, peering with a measure of real curiosity at some of the more
accessible books – but the fire had burned low and in the
half-light he could make out little except the glint of their
precious bindings. The owl on the desk proved to be companioned by
a pair of tiny stuffed mice which sat somewhat smugly right under
the bird's lethal claws secure in the knowledge that the talons
would never be reach them, even though the owl had been caught in a
position of stretching one foot for possible prey. Beside it the
hourglass… the hourglass had not moved.

Aris took a closer look. Yes, there was a
still a very small pile of fine sand in the upper chamber, but now
that he was close enough to see he became aware of the fact that it
was not seeping into the chamber below, in the manner of
hourglasses. In fact, it was frozen, in stasis, as much as the owl
forever reaching for prey which would never be caught.

Touch nothing here that you do not begin to
understand…

It was too late. It was a gesture as
instinctive as time. Aris watched his hand reach for the hourglass,
and turn it over.

He shivered in a sudden blast of cold. An owl
hooted somewhere close by. The friendly house had melted away
around him, and he stood beside a huge snowdrift with the hourglass
in his hand and his harp, his travelling pack, his gleeman's cloak
and a fur-piled pallet with one first startled and then very irate
cat at his feet. Upon closer inspection he appeared to be standing
barefoot in the snow, with his boots a step away at the edge of the
pallet. Aris hopped onto the furs of the pallet, displacing the
hissing cat, and quickly drew the boots onto feet already blue with
cold – then, before doing anything else, working swiftly to wrap
the exposed harp into its multi-layered pack. Only once this was
done did he pause and stare at the hourglass, which he had dropped
into the snow when making the dive for his footwear.

The sky was clear, hung with stars and a huge
close golden moon, but it was bitterly cold and his breath hung in
white clouds before his face.

A deep sigh behind him made him spin in the
direction from whence it had come, and he found himself looking at
a wizened old man, bent with age, his sparse hair white and
straggly across the collar of his robe. He leaned heavily on a
carved staff, both gnarled and twisted hands, bare of gloves, upon
its head. There was nothing in this ancient being to suggest the
almost childlike youth of Aris's erstwhile host, Bek. But then the
old man looked up and the eyes were the same glowing embers of blue
fire.

"The Eternal Hour was a high fee to choose,
gleeman," the creature that was Bek said in a low voice cracked
with the passage of time.

"The Eternal Hour?" repeated Aris
blankly.

"What you hold," Bek said, "made me and my
home timeless. You could have spent a century inside my room and
emerged young and beautiful the next morning."

Aris picked up the hourglass gingerly and
held it out. "But I don't…"

Bek shook his head. "Too late. It is in your
hand now. I mean – take a look around you… nothing made it that was
not part of your immediate environment when you touched the glass.
Your own belongings, and then the pallet you slept on, the mug you
drank from, the chair you sat on…" This was correct; only now did
Aris notice these items, incongruous in the snow. "And one careless
cat," chuckled Bek, with real amusement. "Well, they're yours now,
cat and all. And the hourglass. You control your life now, to use
however you choose. You may take whomever you wish into the stasis
with you, and they may then leave unmolested… unless they touch the
glass, and you may not warn them directly not to do so. Just be
warned – it is a treasure with a price…"

Aris shivered, and not with cold. "What?"

"Keep it too long and you forget what time
is," said Bek. "I received it when I was very, very young… and kept
it for too many centuries…." He coughed. "They do catch up with
you…"

"But I don't want it," Aris said obstinately,
a hint of panic in his voice.

"Then," said Bek, "you had better give it
away within this hour – before the sand runs out to the last few
grains, and then stops, starting your Eternal Hour."

"But if someone else…"

"If someone else turns the hourglass over
before the end of the hour, it is theirs," said Bek. "But just as
you may not warn them not to touch it when it belongs to you, so
you may not hide its nature while it is still free. It may be taken
in ignorance or innocence, but never passed on willingly under the
same geas. If you give it away, you give away
everything – including the knowledge of its power." Bek chuckled.
"And you may find it hard to find people who love eternal life
enough to take it over by choice…."

He began to flicker and to fade against the
gleaming moonlit snow. Aris threw out an imploring hand. "No!
Wait!…"

"Be careful with your gift…" Bek's voice came
drifting back, and then he was gone, completely gone, leaving Aris
alone in an empty wilderness with an hourglass that held his
destiny. He sank down onto the furs that had been his pallet,
dropping the hourglass beside him in the snow, and buried his head
in his hands.

The cat came high-stepping daintily back to
the furs from the snow where it had initially fled. It approached
the human, butting Aris's knee with its head, purring loudly, but
this elicited no measurable response. The cat came round the back
of Aris and settled against the side of his leg where he sat on the
furs, starting to clean itself.

Spend the winter in Ghulkit.

Aris allowed himself a bitter chuckle at the
memory of a stray thought that had accompanied him on the road
before he had found Bek's house – a thought that took on the force
of premonition, seen with hindsight. If he wasn't careful he could
find himself spending eternity here.

The cat leaned more insistently against him,
letting out a small whimper. Aris lifted his head and turned to
look at it, resting his chin on hands folded on his knees.

"Poor beast," he murmured, "you hardly asked
for this…"

He reached for the cat, awkwardly, at an
angle; the cat shied, backing away. Its hind leg slipped off the
edge of the fur, onto snow… and into the side of the hourglass.

Which tumbled slowly, and then righted
itself.

On the opposite end.

Sand began flowing back into the chamber it
had just left.

Aris sat frozen in mid motion, staring,
unable to believe his eyes. He had not fulfilled the geas of
explaining the nature of the hourglass to the cat, but the cat was
an animal – would such an explanation have made any difference? And
could he really take a serendipitous accident as a gift from the
gods and walk away, free?

The cat had gone over to investigate the
hourglass as Aris carefully rose from the pallet furs, slung his
harp-pack securely diagonally across his shoulder and chest, and
reached for his pack. Slowly, quietly, like a thief stealing away,
he backed off from the cat that would never die. He gained the edge
of the road he had been travelling before he had found Bek's house,
and hesitated, very briefly, as he cast a glance first in the
direction in which he had been heading, then back along the way he
had already come.

I could get RICH in Ghulkit!

Would they laugh at him if he returned
destitute, frozen, in rags?

Would they miss him if he never came back at
all?

But he was a gleeman. It was their appointed
task to seek, to find, to experience. If some chose to hide from
that task in comfort and safety – well – they would sing the same
old songs to tired audiences till the end of time….

The end of time.

Aris shivered, irresolute for a moment under
the golden moon. He glanced back briefly and then turned, staring.
The pewter mug and the chair in which he had sat in Bek's house
were still there – but the pallet, its furs and the cat were gone.
And so was the hourglass.

A voice inside his mind screamed at Aris to
flee this enchanted place, to seek familiar places and more
hospitable lands. But there was a shimmer of moonlight on the
horizon, and the snow gleamed with promise underneath the stars. He
was Aris, gleeman, storyteller, and there were more stories out
there to be found.

There was no choice at all.

The moon pooled and shimmered in the
footsteps of the trail he left behind him, following the
snow-mantled road into the future.

This story was submitted to
an all-YA edition of a well-known fantasy magazine, to a respected
editor experienced in her field. She held on to the story for the
longest time and then, regretfully, passed – she had a limited
number of spaces and, she said to me in a cover letter, she had had
to let a number of stories she would under other circumstances have
loved to publish to to (perhaps) other homes. I attempted one of
her suggestions, but in a situation that was a complete reversal of
the "Hourglass" story, this particular tale went to its chosen
market… and met the same fate – the editor adored it, but could not
make a case for using it in the journal's current context. What
this means, of course, is that this is a BRAND NEW STORY that has
NEVER BEEN PUBLISHED BEFORE, or even seen by more than a handful of
people. And now, here, it is offered to you the new reader,
released into the world – to find its place amongst the other
stories where cats have padded in on silent but regal feet and
demanded their rightful place in the spotlight
.

-----0-----

I've said it many times to those who have
come to seek me out over the years. Happiness is a cocoon. You
cannot find the safe house until you need it – because until you
need it, you do not know that it is there.

I don't know what changed for me when I
turned ten. My family, until then my refuge and my sanctuary,
turned a dark corner somehow – the details I still do not know, and
I would have known even less of them back then, back when I was
still a child, back when such things would not have been spoken of
in front of me anyway. But that summer was when I remember things
beginning to go rotten – I remember my life acquiring a queasy
softness to it, the kind that would suck in a careful exploratory
touch, let it sink into yielding spongy flesh as though into a
fleshy paunch.

The summer I turned ten was the summer my
older brother was arrested – a bunch of his friends had held up a
local convenience store, and although he was not the one actually
holding the gun, he was the only one who was identified by the
store owner (where our family shopped fairly regularly) and he was
the only one picked up. He would not snitch on his mates, so he
took the fall – and they managed to pin the charge of armed robbery
and attempted murder on him. He was seventeen years old, but his
eighteenth birthday loomed in mere weeks; the lawyers stretched out
the trial, and on the day he turned eighteen they charged him in
court as an adult. His life was shattered, gone, annihilated. It
was as though he had grown up all these years, had waited all this
time, only to hit this wall when he became old enough for the
impact to kill him. I never saw him again.