Authors: Alice Borchardt
Windows—or were they windows or just openings in the wall—looked out on the whitest sand beach he had ever seen. The noon sun shone on it so brightly that he found his eyes flooded with the purple glow that too much light rouses. Beyond the beach were the transparent green shallows of a sapphire sea. A steady yet not hard breeze blew through the windows, cooling the room.
For a few moments, he was uncomfortable because he couldn’t find a place to relieve himself, the purity of the beach being such that he didn’t wish to contaminate it. But then he found a shallow alcove in the next room. A flow of warm water ran through it, down into what looked like some sort of porous rock, where the water vanished from sight.
Beyond the alcove was another, dimmer room containing a large, round pool. Above, the broken, domed roof was covered by the same iron fern and harbored another rose clinging to the edges of the opening. The one in the bedroom had been pink; this was bloodred and its petals were scattered like ruby droplets over the water in the white marble pool.
He bathed and then, entering a small foyer, walked out onto what had been a colonnaded porch. But the columns were broken now, and it was roofed only by an overhang from the side of the house. Tables spread with food nested under the overhang: fruit of all kinds—peaches, pears, apples, table grapes, plums—and more hearty fare, milk, cold meat, cheese, wine, and bread, all fresh, all bursting with flavor.
He breakfasted on milk, cheese, peaches, and grapes, then waded out into the sunstruck shallow sea. Those earliest of living things—stromatolites, cushions of calcareous, green algae—clustered near the beach, sheltered by the rocky arms of the bay. They grew to enormous size, beautiful green-velvet hassocks in water so clear that his wolf’s eye could almost count the grains of sand on the bottom.
Is this the first place or the last?
he asked himself. The wind, the silence, the sea, and the sand.
“But,” she answered, “I don’t know and never cared to find out.”
“No!” he said. “Really.” And he turned toward her, unsurprised.
“No! Really!” she repeated. “This is the place I invited you to at first. This is my home insofar as I have one.”
He gazed out over the water. “It’s beautiful here, and very peaceful.”
“Yes,” she said, “and beginning or ending of the world, it only stands to reason that those animals and plants that emerged first are probably tough enough to survive till the end.”
“Tell me your name?” he asked.
“No!” she replied.
“Haven’t I earned it?”
“No. You have come closer than many mortals.”
“Closer than
any
mortal,” he countered.
“Yesssss,” was the reluctant, slow reply. “But no! Love me?” she asked.
They returned to the beach and embraced, feet in the slow, shallow combers. In the distance near the horizon, a line of squall clouds appeared and, moving slowly toward land, began to darken the sky.
“Does it rain here?” he asked, stroking the curve of her back to bring her hips and thighs higher, over his penis.
“Yes, sometimes,” she whispered as she bit his lip and drew blood.
Desire was a thrill in his body. He felt himself a stone phallus, as though he could endure forever at the shattering crest of satisfaction. Her moan of pleasure was a sobbing cry of helplessness as they were swept together into what seemed an end to thought and perhaps even life itself. The throbbing pulse of fulfillment went on and on and on, until a cold wind from the summer sea pulled them into consciousness again, and the gray and white storm clouds began to extinguish the sun.
They rolled apart.
“God,” she whispered. “All I wanted was a tumble, and now this.” She was a pale silk rag against the glowing sand.
He rose to his knees, and she watched as he drew a character in the damp sand just above the wave line. He was very careful of the curves and dips. He looked out into the oncoming storm, at the rainbows playing in the trailing veils of rain. He frowned, his fine brows almost touching each other. Then he surrounded the character he’d drawn with quantifiers, little hooks and twisting lines that balanced the curving character in a square, then made a circle around it.
Belatedly alarmed, she shouted, “No! Those damn things are dangerous. No one knows how to control them. This whole place could . . . vanish, explode.”
“Too late,” he said, leaping to his feet. “What I wanted to do is in process.”
The character he had first drawn was red-molten, glowing and seething the way sand in a glass oven glows as it softens and becomes flexible in the unspeakable heat of the forge. She jumped to her feet, backing away as the radiant heat scalded her body.
“No!” she screamed again as the fire spread into the sand around it, all of it shifting, liquefying, glowing.
The rain squall hit, and she ran toward the broken porch of the ruined dwelling. Over the spot where he’d written the character, a whirlwind hung, drawing ferocious winds from the rain, steam pouring up and into the whirlwind, which vented it up into the boiling clouds above.
Then the rain became a blinding flood, and she found herself clinging to his almost iron-seeming body. Her nails lacerated his flesh, her face pressed against his chest, as she tried to escape the ice pellets and the rapidly dropping temperature as the storm sucked the raw heat from the land into violent updrafts, which carried the moisture so high it froze. Then it sent down a surge of hail over them, and the barren hills and mountains beyond.
As quickly as the storm had arisen, it was gone, and they stood together, looking out over the sea as the squall moved inland to freshen the coast.
It rested on the sand near the water, a crystal bowl not large but beautiful, with an endless play of rainbows in its substance. She let go of his arms and walked toward it as though hypnotized, and lifted it in her hands, holding it to the light, its unchanging yet ever-changing rainbows and kaleidoscopic beauty a splendor and a delight to the eye. So fragile was it that when the wind struck it, the glass sang, telling in a multiplicity of notes the strength of the wind and its direction.
My mind was still filled with the flight I had seen when we started down the trail to the city gates. I wasn’t watching the road, until Albe spoke in my ear.
“I don’t like this.”
She was right. The road dipped down the hillside and was a prime place for an ambush. The hexagonal blocks ran between high walls of broken rocks and through occasional ravines, washes, and pour-offs.
“Cat country,” Albe said.
“How would you know cat country?” I asked.
“My family had flocks of sheep. I brought them from the island to the mainland to graze in the winter when the islands are scoured by wind and rain. There were cats in the rocks among the sheltered valleys where there is grass no matter how bad the weather gets. Cat,” she said. “Small cat, sometimes large cat.”
Meth was still leading the party, but armor isn’t the most comfortable thing to walk in, and I caught up to him easily.
“Cat?” I asked.
He jumped. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Why do you think it isn’t safe to go out at night? Can’t you smell it?”
Then I found I could. When the sea—the Dead Sea wind—slowed (it never really stopped), the rocks around us reeked of male cat musk.
I drew my sword. He cringed at the blade cry when it slipped the sheath.
“I didn’t do . . .”
“I know . . . I know,” I reassured him. “I just want to take point.”
He dropped back gratefully, actually a little too far back. And I knew Meth’s heroism wouldn’t extend to trying to protect me against any type of attacker.
I tried to remember what Maeniel taught me about cats—big and little. They love broken country filled with rocky jumbles, cliffs, and mountain trails. They are elusive, seldom seen unless you come across their sign on sand or in low, muddy places.
Yes, there were yet a few big ones. The clouded leopard once roamed all of Europe, but they have become increasingly rare, since their pelts are much sought after; their depredations against livestock in the high summer pastures are even more serious than those of wolves. But there was something about them that had—
The weight hit my neck like a sack of sand, flattening me belly-down on the trail. My elbow hit a rock, numbing my hand to the wrist. I felt the fangs slide on my armor at the neck, and I remembered what I had forgotten—the cat’s death bite. The most dangerous part of the cat’s attack is its killing bite.
I did as Maeniel taught me: I snapped to my hands and knees and bucked like a horse. The claws on my breast and arm slid on the armor, and I tore free. I spun around, sword in hand to confront my enemy.
He was a white, marked with clouded semicircles. He stood his ground and screamed in fury. He was as large as a full-grown male wolf. The screech he gave echoed throughout the rocks around us.
“Nooooo! I had you! You have armor! You had no armor when I jumped! NO FAIR!”
“Fair enough for me, you sneaky young killer!”
“I’ll have you yet!”
He lunged forward, inside my guard. I swung the sword hilt and my fist at his nose. He let out another eerie scream as the blow landed hard.
“Ouch! That hurt!”
I laughed and jumped back so I could get a clear swing at him with my sword. Another voice intruded into my consciousness.
“You young fool! Get out of there now! Can’t you see you’re overmatched? Run!”
But he didn’t get a chance. Albe was there, and she had her sling. The lead shot landed with an audible thud at the base of the cat’s skull where the neck joins it. He went down, a sprawl of furry limbs, deeply unconscious.
Meth and Cateyrin ran up. Meth drew his knife, and I knew he meant to cut the cat’s throat.
“No,” I said. I had talked to the thing and I wasn’t going to kill anything I could talk to. Not right away, at least.
“No!” Cateyrin shouted also. “This is a young one. They can be enslaved. Some of the houses do it.”
“Even then they’re dangerous,” Meth said. “Besides, he may have friends about.”
“He does,” I answered.
Albe drew her sword and glanced around.
I shouted, “You! Show yourself! What are you? His father?”
From a distance, I heard, “Oh, Christ. No! A shapeling.” This was followed by a scrabbling in the rocks, then silence.
Then I realized Meth, Cateyrin, and Albe were all staring at me in astonishment.
“Albe?” I asked.
“You made a sound, just like the cat did,” she explained.
Yes, it was true. I did talk to Mother and the dragons as I had to the Faun.
“I want it,” I said, pointing to the cat. “Tie it up, Albe.”
I never found her at a loss about anything. She managed to tie the cat up in such a way that I could throw its furry body over my shoulders like a big scarf. I had a few scratches, and a trickle of blood found its way down the cat’s neck from the bruise at the base of its skull, but otherwise, both of us were uninjured.
Cateyrin and Meth began quarreling about the cat, one wanting to kill and skin it, the other castrate it, then sell the neutered male to one of the great families. I didn’t feel any desire to do either. The impetuous half-grown male seemed to be a troublemaker, and I felt very likely he would try to ambush us again. But we soon walked out of ambush country and the rock walls towered over us above.
The rocks walls and the city grew bigger and more impressive by the moment. The cat woke up. He began to struggle.
“I told you,” Meth said. “Kill and skin him.”
The cat let out a yell of rage.
“You stop that,” I said.
“If you cut his balls off now,” Cateyrin said, drawing her knife, “he won’t . . .”
This time the cat let out a yowl of sheer terror, then a series of really lethal-sounding screeches and hisses.
Albe had made him a crude muzzle with a strip of rawhide. His head was hanging next to my neck. I brought my armor up and dropped him to the ground hard. Then I drew my sword.
The cat really began to wiggle and scream then.
“Mooooootherrrrr!”
“Mother?” Albe said.
This surprised me. “Cateyrin said it is a young one,” I said.
Since cats don’t talk the way humans do, the muzzle didn’t keep him especially quiet.
“You can understand him?” I asked.
“Most times. I think it’s the shoes. Talorcan’s shoes.”
“Stop screeching for your mother,” she told the cat. “She—” Albe indicated me—“isn’t going to harm you.”
“Mooootherrrr!” from the cat. He was damn near deafening.
“You keep that up,” Albe told him, “I’ll skin and gut you all right . . . then I’ll kill you.”
“Oh!” Meth said.
“That sounds horrible,” Cateyrin said, sounding awed.
The cat was shocked silent.
“Good!” I said. “Keep quiet and keep still while I cut you loose.”
Maeniel taught me the sword. I could have freed the cat even while he was in full writhe, but it was easier this way. He sat up and began licking himself to put his fur in order. And between swipes, he glared murderously at Albe, Meth, and Cateyrin.
“Now,” I said. “You’ve got your dignity and your freedom back. Go away and trouble us no more.”
He didn’t leave. He threw another glare at the rest, then studied me with narrowed, green eyes.
“You are a Daughter of the Danae,” he said.
“A mortal Daughter of the Danae,” I corrected him.
“Nonetheless, a Daughter of the Danae.”
“I suppose so,” I answered. “Why?”
“What an opportunity!” he said.
“What opportunity?” I asked. “A minute ago, you were yelling for your mother. Get out of here.”
“Don’t remind me.” Then he rose and began to pace back and forth, lashing his tail.
“Friend,” I said, pointing to the city towering above us with my sword, “I have business at the city. And you are in my way. . . .”
“I would . . . I would . . .” He was still pacing. Then he stopped and faced me and got the rest out. “Enter your service!”
“What?” I said. I was flabbergasted. “You tried to—”
“I know. I know.” He continued pacing. “I know all that stuff about your being mortal . . . but see, I know I’ll never be as big as some of the rest. I probably won’t get laid till I’m fifteen, if then,” he told me dourly. “The male clans are very status conscious. And hell, I’m the runt of my litter. The girls beat up on me all the time. I need an edge. You could be it.”