“All right, then, where is it?” he asked. “I saw you palm it, now where’d it go?”
“My cat has it.”
Grohd leaned around the stranger. The cat sat placidly on the table, staring off into space. Grohd looked up at his pilgrim. “Go on. What’d you do—throw it to him?”
“Sort of.” Lyrec turned and walked over to the table, then stood in such a way that Grohd’s view of what happened next was blocked. On the far side of Lyrec, the table drummed and clattered as if a full purse of coins had been spilled onto it.
When Lyrec turned again, he held up two gold coins. Behind him the black cat squatted with a look of supreme boredom amidst a pile of at least three dozen more.
“Thank you,” Lyrec said. He laid two coins on the taverner’s palm. “That’s yours and the one you won.” He added a third. “And that’s for the drink and more to come.” He started to turn away with his drink, but paused. “Oh, yes. I’d like a cup of grynne for Borregad.”
Grohd continued to stare in wonder at the table. “Who?” he asked.
“Sorry, the cat. Borregad is my cat. And Lyrec is my name.”
“Pleased to meet you … I—” He shook his head to clear it. “Lyrec, then. Grohd is my name. Drink for the cat, is it? Certainly.” He felt blindly for another cup while he nodded at the table in a state of numismatic lust, which is to say it was not the cat he nodded to. “Anything else?” he asked hopefully.
“As a matter of fact, yes. I seem to have torn my purse with that trick. It was an old thing, anyway—do you have something I could buy from you to replace it?”
“Buy? Your purse … oh!” Grohd closed his fist over the three gold coins. “A spare purse, yes, I have a number around somewhere, should be suitable. Certainly you may buy one. Take it out of your, um, your advance. Yes. Just let me get your cat his cup—it is a he, isn’t it—and I’ll get you a purse straight-away. Just have yourself a seat. Sure you’re not hungry or anything? You tell me if you are.” Grohd patted his arm.
Lyrec walked back to the table and sat down. Borregad reclined with his paws curled beneath him. His blue eyes sparkled with amusement. He stared in silence at Lyrec until the tavern master had left him his cup and disappeared into the back in search of a purse. Then, quietly, he said, “So we didn’t know about money, did we? We were
so
busy being rude to our foully transformed friend—weren’t even going to buy him a drink!—that we didn’t think we might need money to survive in this rotten new world, just like in all the rotten parallels. Gracious, did we forget something?”
Lyrec glowered into his cup.
“No answer? Tell me, then—who do you suppose that minstrel was that he mentioned? Nobody we know, I’m sure. It’s a good thing I came with you or you might never have acquired any money. That innkeeper has probably seen every variation on that game that’s ever been played. Maybe he invented it. What do you think?”
“Borregad,” Lyrec said tightly. Then he sighed. “Thank you for your assistance.”
The cat blinked, and leaned one paw up under his chin, spilling some of the coins around him. “You’re welcome.”
Grohd returned from the back room. He held a purse in each hand. “Here. I brought you two because I don’t have one that’s big enough for all them coins.” He set them down beside Borregad. “Hey, I’ve never seen a cat sit like that before.”
“Unusual, isn’t he?” Lyrec drawled. “A dreadful example of inbreeding, I’m afraid.”
“Oh,” Grohd replied, and nodded, though his face was a mask of confusion.
“Too bad.” He patted Borregad on the head. “Does that mean he won’t live as long as most cats?”
“Very likely.”
“Ahh. And he’s such a big fellow, too. That’s a shame.” He wandered off into the back room again.
Borregad stuck out his lower lip.
Lyrec smiled.
“Should I ask him if he has a little wagon for you?”
The cat’s muzzle twitched, and he occupied himself with his drink.
Chapter 3.
As twilight settled over Secamelan, Lyrec sat at the same table in the tavern, drinking and chatting with Grohd. His cheek was rosy and his gaze distant, but these were the only signs that the incredible amount of grynne he had drunk had affected him at all.
This imbibing of grynne impressed Grohd. He could have accepted anything about Lyrec, any dreadful truth, in light of this remarkable bibulous capacity. Secretly, he was pleased with the biographical information he had heard—that it tallied so closely with what he had guessed originally. He had no idea how many of the place names and notions he’d supplied Lyrec himself.
The story unfolded slowly: Lyrec had been abroad most of his life, in search of a long lost acquaintance who had struck out alone before him; passing through so many lands, he’d forgotten most of his native knowledge, customs, nuances. The blood of cultural veins all ran together. When asked, he informed Grohd that the minstrel of the previous day was not the person Lyrec sought. Their coincident accents were simply the result of common location rather than familiarity.
None of the details of the story surprised Grohd. He had heard many strange tales of men who had journeyed off in search of promised riches, and he had never met one who came back with anything to show for it save the skin on his bones, and sometimes not even that. He himself was no traveler, and he relished the tales of lands he’d encountered only in legend or myth, and in particular the one tale of a land he had never heard mentioned before, a land decimated by grim plague which Lyrec and the cat had barely survived.
Like two old sailors home from the seas, the two men dramatized and mythicized; Grohd matched every story with one of his own, and also matched the pilgrim for every drink. Lyrec insisted on paying for them all—and for the big cat’s as well, whenever the black beast seemed so inclined. Grohd put up an argument at having his own drinks bought; but not so strong an argument that he came anywhere near winning it. Lyrec was paying enough to supply drinks to a full tavern.
Being so much smaller than the two men, Borregad required little of the heady brew to reach his own plateau of insensibility. Within the first hour his blue eyes had glazed; by the second hour his eyelids had drooped almost shut; and after the third, his eyes had sprung wide open and thereafter remained crossed, even as he sprawled over on his back with his feet in the air. Now he lay with a hind foot dangling off the table, sleeping soundly, his head propped on both forepaws, a formidable stalactite of tooth protruding on each side of his mouth.
A handful of locals wandered in late in the afternoon, their field work done for awhile and left with a few hours to kill before drifting off to their evening meals. They needed no encouragement to join in the discussion, adding tall tales more often than solid knowledge to what Lyrec had already learned. He kept them supplied with grynne until they were in their cups, and probed each one as the opportunity arose. Finally, toward sundown, they stumbled off together in a single pack like a convoluted centipede going out the door.
Grohd looked after them. “Drunken fools,” he proclaimed amiably as the door closed. Then he belched with deep satisfaction. “Ahh. Time for me to make supper. Will you be staying awhile, Lyrec?”
“I’ll stay the night and another perhaps if you have the room.” He downed the last of his drink, then placed the cup in the center of the table to indicate he was finished and would have no more. He had learned this custom from the farmers.
Grohd said, “Never seen anyone drink so much and look as sober as you—except me.” He took the cup. “I have room, all right. The coach from Dolgellum is due in here tonight, though—not that they’ll fill the place. But you take a bedroll from that pile in the corner and carry it around back to the first hut. Go in and pick yourself a bed now.” Then, speaking slowly, with drunken difficulty, he added, “If you look, you’ll find a loft up the stairs—might suit you and the cat well enough.”
“The coach to Atlarma—it
does go through day after tomorrow?”
“That’s so. There’s just the one, up out of Miria. You could’ve waited for it, saved yourself the walk. There’s no coaches to Ladoman, in case you hadn’t reasoned that from what the fellows said this evening. Only thing coming out of there is trouble.” One of his favorite sayings.
“Indeed, Why isn’t something done about it?”
“Oh, well, now, King Dekür’s not about to start a war over a few gadfly incidents like those. There’s maybe six or seven a year, not enough to justify a war. And it’s mostly them that house the Ladomantine fugitives that get involved. Dekür’s a good king and all, but he’s not out to champion every piddling cause or meddling fool. We know where we stand in Secamelan.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “If you think of it, you might take time to set a fire in the hearth back there. Winter owns half the day now. Pretty soon, the old man’ll have it all. These people, they’ll be stiff and tired by the time they get here.” He waddled off into darkness.
Lyrec said softly, “Borregad,” and then gave a mental call:
Borregad.
The cat’s eyes opened, then closed quickly. “Um, too bright.”
“Never mind that, How much did you get?”
Borregad put his paws over his head. “You won’t like it. Either they’re all dense with barely a thought between them, or these creatures can’t be probed.” Squinting, he opened one eye again.
“Then why was I able to pick so much from Grohd? Why were we able to probe the minstrel?”
The cat raised his head petulantly. “Who says we probed him? All we extracted from him was language—with the exception of a few memory images near the surface, like his magic tricks and my wonderful form. Didn’t even get a money concept. And can you play any of his songs? You said yourself he seemed blocked off or stupid. Besides, you doubt me, then why don’t
you
do some probing?”
“I was trying to,” Lyrec admitted. “I couldn’t get anything, either.”
Borregad smirked. “So. It works on some of them and not on others. Mostly, not. That won’t make things easier for us.”
“No, it won’t. Why should it be so?”
“Chemistry, quite probably. I’d be more precise about it if we’d had more races to experience—if
most of them hadn’t been annihilated by the time we arrived. It may be like this on every one of these worlds. From what those farmers say there doesn’t seem to be much going on here out of the ordinary. Their biggest gripe seems to be that Ladomirus character.”
“He does come up in the conversation, doesn’t he? Still, he hardly sounds like more than, as Grohd said, a local gadfly. Borregad, you don’t suppose we’ve made a mistake, do you?”
“Do you mean do I think we’re sitting in the wrong sphere while he’s elsewhen? Sequestered in the wrong parallel?
’pon my soul. I thought you were immune to doubt.” The cat stood and arched his back, stretching to his claws. “Just the same, no, I don’t believe so. At most we’ve arrived too soon. You worry too much, you know.”
“Do I?” He pushed back his chair and stood “If there were just some sign …”
Borregad moaned. “I’m going to suffer come morning.”
“That’s not quite the omen I meant.” He walked across the room and returned with a bedroll, “I’ll go pick out a space for us. You may just as well stay put.”
“Fine,” said the cat, slumping back down. “In that case, I’ll take another cup.”
“Idiot.” He withdrew a coin from his pocket and set it beside the cat.
“Grohd,” he called out. “When you have a minute, Borregad needs some help with his suicide attempt.” Then he walked out the door.
Outside, the air had a chill upon it and Lyrec’s arms turned to gooseflesh. Surprising, he thought, how quickly the cold had moved in. The gold and green trees rocked in a wind which, because it was blowing from the northwest, kept the sound of approaching horses from Lyrec’s ears.
He went casually around the tavern and into the first of the two conical huts.
*****
It took Grohd awhile to understand exactly what Lyrec had meant, but he and the big black cat finally reached a state of mutual understanding if not communication: The cat looked at him then at the empty cup on the table, then sharply back at Grohd again. The keeper brought him another full cup, then returned to the back room to chop up more vegetables for his stew.
Borregad embraced the wooden cup with the passion of a lover. He sat, hind legs around its base, his forepaws straddling its lip, bending farther and farther over as the quantity of the grynne diminished.
When the tavern door opened, he was bent almost double.
His head was practically upside down, his muddled brain swimming as he lapped the last of his drink. He was too busy to look up and see who had come in. Besides, who else could it be but Lyrec?
Then the cup was snatched sharply away from him. Borregad reacted with a cat’s instincts rather than his own; he blindly slashed at the hand stealing his cup.
His claws dug into flesh and tore four deep gouges in the back of that hand.
The grynne thief screeched in pain. The hand jerked up in a spasm that sent the cup sailing over the bar, splashing a small stream of dark brown liquid across two tables.
Borregad realized he had probably just wounded his friend. With sudden sobriety, he lifted his head to apologize.
His head was immediately slammed flat against the table by the same hand he had cut. Borregad looked up and wished suddenly that it
had
been Lyrec.
The man holding him down growled, “You rotten little
fekh
. I’ll have your guts on a plate while you’re still breathing.” The man was tall and broad-shouldered. His thick beard grew high up on his cheeks, almost up to his bloodshot glaring blue eyes. He wore an orange and brown tunic, tied down by a wide belt that hung low under the weight of a sword, an axe, and two sheathed daggers. There was a second man behind him, but with his head trapped against the tabletop, Borregad could not make him out except for one arm and a leg that came within his range of view.
Borregad gulped, then tried forcefully to pull his head out from under the hand. The grip tightened on his throat, nearly choking him. He stopped fighting and lay on the table, his eyes bulging, his heart racing.