by Andre Norton
So much the humans have that they fear-not just dogs or claws or hunger; not even rogues like the mad two-legs who stole human kittens. But of being cold inside, as I was last night, without friends to curl up beside, of long, long years of being cold. They live far longer than we do. I used to hate them for it. Now, I know it is nothing I should envy.
Fears and sounds and scents boil about me, a frightening brew that causes even a human to freeze in her footsteps. Abruptly, I am a kitten again, jerked from my mother and littermates, dumped in a bag, then left on cold stone.
These two-legs feel that way every day, I realize, and yet they go about their lives not complaining, just as we do not complain when we are ill. Things get better, or they do not.
“How are you?” they greet each other.
“Fine,” they reply, though they are not.
They are not cowards, though they are often fools.
Except the rare ones: the singers and healers of souls. I am not fit to be one of that breed. I will admit it-I fear the task. Yet I cannot look away.
When Merlin’s human returns that evening, she arrives with red eyes and a sack that looks most gratifyingly heavy. I think I scent catnip. The cans in the sack are the tiny, delectable ones.
“These are for Puff,” she declares. “I promised I would, and here they are. Besides, I may not need them. And if I do, I’ll buy more. Lots more.”
Everyone makes comforting sounds. No one is fooled. Whatever else they are, two-legs-I mean “people”-are not always stupid.
“Chicken,” I tell Merlin, licking my lips. “Very good, too. Don’t you want any?” I would have given all of mine if he had eaten.
He blinks his eyes shut. They are glazing. Any other cat would have turned his face to the wall, abandoned his traitor body, and set out on the Dreamtrails long before.
“Do you want more strength?” I ask. I do not want the bitter water and the thorn and the weakness again, but they might make him strong for a little while.
“It would be wasted.” Even with the sunshine pulsing through the pad beneath him, he is cold. “She thanked me and said I was free to go. But I am not!”
“Don’t you want to go?” I ask.
Merlin sighs. “I want the pain to stop. It would be good to be young again and leap into the air for the joy of it once more. I want to see those trails I’ve dreamed of and learn whether the water is as sweet, the birds as fat and slow as instinct tells me. But the Dreamtrails will be very lonely without humans.”
He meets my eyes.
“Do you still deny your inner name is Healer?”
There is something he wants of me-hope, perhaps?
I put my head upon my front paws. “I looked, Singer. I did. I cannot help you any more than they can. But your spirit is too strong to slip away. You must choose, or they will send you.”
“Not yet,” Merlin tells me. “The thing I dreamt lies in wait, and I must track it to its lair. That is my gift, as sharing strength in yours. Help me hunt.”
I hunker down by the big cat. He smells old now and sick. His fur is dull, and his mouth dry. But the spirit that leaps forth to hunt his human’s thoughts is-young and spry.
“You won’t admit it, but I think you like her,” he says, his whiskers set at a smug angle. “Most Free Folk do.”
When we next track her thoughts, she is walking down a street, her eyes following the movements when a movement catches them. From a narrow way between two lairs darts a two-legs, lean and thin and fast. Though his jaws do not foam, I know he is mad. A long thorn glints in one hand. Quickly, he stalks his quarry: a female pushing another’s kitten in a wheeled box. No sooner seen than pounced upon.
The female human screams and falls, blood steaming in the cold air. The kitten sets up a thin wailing as the mad two-legs snatches it up. The other people stand trapped as one of us might alone at night on a road with two suns racing toward you and a horn blaring.
“He’s got a knife!” someone whispers.
“Call 911.”
“‘Fraid to move.”
The mad two-legs starts to back off, clutching the two-leg infant he has stolen. He kicks the wheeled box away.
“No,” whispers Merlin’s human. Again, she is afraid. The smell of the other’s blood turns her sick.
“No,” she says again. She cannot take her eyes from the mad one’s thorn. She cannot shut out the smell of the blood, the thin wail of the human kitten. She can not run away. She is afraid to move, afraid to die. The fear builds up and up past bearing. And then-
“No!” she screams, a yowl of battle fury that would have done any of the Free Folk proud. “Oh, no, you don’t!”
She tugs her pouch from her shoulder, runs forward, swings it, and lashes down with it upon the arm that holds the thorn. The thorn drops. It rings upon the dirty stone.
“Get the knife!” she screams. Carrying his prey, the mad one starts to run off.
“No!” Merlin howls. “Let’s stop him!” He flings his spirit self clear of his body toward his human. I yowl and follow him. In that instant, our strength burns through the ties that hold him to his flesh and her to her fear. She shrieks and hurls herself forward, stumbling on her foolish “shoes,” and toppling forward. At the last instant, she reaches out and grasps the madman’s knees.
“Help!” she gasps. Blood pours down her muzzle. The mad one begins to thrash. As small as Merlin’s human is, she cannot hold him long. Merlin and I pour our strength into her, and her grasp tightens. Her eyes blaze like the full moon in a fighting cat’s eyes, sweeping round the people who stand, still too afraid to move, and kindling them.
“Great tackle, lady!” yells a burly male and leaps in to help. Two others join him.
“I’ll call 911!”
And Merlin’s human, creeping forward fast, snatches the baby from the mad two-legs, clutches it to her breast as if it were her own, and runs to the female who lies bleeding on the ground.
“The baby’s fine,” she tells the woman. “But you’re not.” She hands the baby over to a friend, then reaches about her neck and pulls free a wrapping much like Merlin has to wear. “So much for this scarf,” she mutters and begins to wind it about the hurt one’s arm.
She has the blood flow stopped when a pack of male humans arrives, as alike in what they wear as littermates can be in markings.
“Police,” she says. “Thank God.”
She wipes at the blood on her muzzle. When the men came up to her, she speaks calmly. We can see them shake their heads and purse their lips in admiration.
“Lady, you’ve got guts,” one tells her as he writes down her name.
“She’s not afraid, did you see that?” Merlin exults. “She’s not afraid! Not any more! Not ever again!”
His spirit leaps in the air for joy…
… and comes down in nothingness. “Free!” he whispers. “At last I’m free to hunt!”
His eyes fill with awe and wonder. “How beautiful it is. And look-!”
I see him leave his body behind and race toward the deep, darkness of a stand of trees I have only seen in my dreams. I follow him in thought. Within the Dreamtrails would be patches of sun and shadow, clear, clean streams, and fat, stupid fowl and fish. He will hunt until he tires and sleep on soft grass, then rise to hunt again or roll in a meadow, letting the sun shine upon the fur of his underbelly. There will be mates for him, and kittens. He will be young again, forever.
Still, he had feared to be alone. Well, perhaps I could follow. And I do want to see. I hurl myself forward, but a door I cannot see slams before my nose, and I go sprawling. My thoughts reel, but I think I hear Merlin meow with joy at the sight of a tall, stocky human male, whose face I had seen in his human’s dreams and whom she had mourned as gone ahead. He comes walking beside a creature that dwarfed us all in size and length of fangs: one of the Free Folk of the very longest time ago.
“Look at the furball, Steelsheen,” booms the human. “I think I know this one.”
So hu
mans do hunt the Dreamtrails, companioned by the eldest Folk of all.
Merlin runs toward him and is swept onto his shoulder where he chirps and purrs like a kitten. They disappear into the lush shadows…
… and I awake beside the cage in which Merlin’s husk lies cast aside.
I nose open the door and begin to groom him. He and his human had been vain of his fur; when she returns, as I know she will, it would hurt her to see him with a matted coat.
The vision at the last of Merlin entering the Dreamtrails dazes my senses, or I would hear my people come in.
“Puff? What are you doing in… ohhh, Merlin slipped away. Do you think Puff Knew?”
“That one? He doesn’t care. Not Puff.” Pain quivers in the young human’s voice as she moves me gently aside and reaches to straighten Merlin’s body’s limbs. “Not like this one. What a neat cat. Well, I’m not looking forward to seeing Ms. Black come in, are you? At least Dr. Colt will have to be the one to tell her, not me.”
She shuts the door to the cage and moves away, walking slowly, her shoulders bent. I smell sadness on her. It hurts me, too.
I pad toward her, slip between her legs, and sit before her feet. I mew.
“Why, Puff! What is it, lad?”
I mew again, arch up, and paw at her knee.
“You want to be picked up? You, Puff? Feeling all right?”
Again I cry. She bends and lifts me. To my surprise, the teeth of pain that clench me loosen a little. I begin to purr. As if the sound eases some pain-rat gnawing her, she holds me tighter-though never too tight-and lays her face against my head. Her skin is warm. Under the masking scents of bitter waters, it smells sweet, like a faint dream of my mother and my littermates.
I put up a paw as I had seen Merlin do and pat her face. Salt water falls upon my fur, but for once, I do not care.
We both still feel the pain, but it is less-for both of us. Then, she sets me down.
“Thank you, Puff. I needed to hold someone.”
Another of the things that humans say; this time, I know she means it. I need it, too. She was a healer, or she would be. Well, I am a healer, too. We are all in our rightful places-though she does not know yet just how right they are. Well, she is young for a human; she will learn. I will see to it.
I trot out where the humans and their sick friends wait. If they can take comfort from me, they are welcome to it. Perhaps it will ease the pain I feel: so little time to know a Soulsinger; but losing him aches like a clawed nose.
So much they know, these humans, and so little. So much they take from us-and so much they give.
***
For Merlin, who has gone hunting.
In Carnation by Nancy Springer
She materialized, stood on her familiar padded paws and looked around at an utterly strange place. After every long sleep the world was more changed, and after every incarnation the next lifetime became more bizarre. The last time, a Norwegian peasant woman fleeing “holy” wars, she had come a long sea voyage to what was called the New World. Now she found it so new she scarcely recognized it as Earth at all. Under her paws lay a great slab of something like stone, but with a smell that was not stone’s good ancient smell. Chariots of glass and metal whizzed by at untoward speeds, stinking of their own heat. Grotesque buildings towered everywhere, and in them she could sense the existence of people, more people than had ever burdened the world before, a new kind of people who jangled the air with their fears, their smallness, their suspicion of the gods and one another.
As always when she awoke from a long sleep she was very hungry, and not for food. But this was not a good place for her to go hunting. It terrified her. Running as only a cat can, like a golden streak, she fled from the chariots and their stench, from the buildings and the pettiness in their air until she found something that approximated countryside. Outside the town there was a place with trees and grass.
And on the grass were camped people whose thoughts and feelings did not hang on the air and make it heavy, but flitted and laughed like magpies. We don’t care what the world thinks, the magpies sang. Some of us are thieves and some of us are preachers, some are freaks and some are stars, some of us have three heads and some can’t even get one together, and who cares? We all get along. We are the carnival people. Whether you are a pimp or a whore or a queer or a con artist, if you are one of us you belong, and the world can go blow itself.
A cat is one who walks by herself. Still, A carnival! Yes, thought she, the golden one. This is better. I may find him here. For she was very hungry, and the smells of the carnival were good. She was, after all, a meat eater, and a carnival is made of meat. The day was turning to silver dusk, the carnival glare was starting to light the sky and the carnival blare rose like magpie cries on the air. The cat trotted in through the gate, to the midway, where already the grass was trampled into dirt.
“Come see the petrified Pygmy,” the barkers cried. “Come see the gun that killed Jesse James. Come see the Double-Jointed Woman, the Mule-Faced Girl, the Iron Man of Taipan.”
High striker, Ferris wheel, motordrome, House of Mirrors-it was all new to her, yet the feel in the air was that of something venerable and familiar: greed. Carnival was carnival and had been since lust and feasting began. French fries, sausage ends, bits of cinnamon cake had fallen to the ground, but she did not gnaw at them. Instead, she traversed the midway, past Dunk Bozo and bumper cars, roulette wheel and ring toss, on the lookout for a man, any man so long as he was young and virile and not ugly. Once she had seduced him and satisfied herself, she would discard him. This was her holy custom, and she would be sure she upheld it. A few times in previous lives she had been false to herself, had married and found herself at the mercy of a man who attempted to command her; she had sworn this would not happen again. Eight of her lifetimes were gone. Only one remained to her, and she was determined to live this one with no regrets.
On the hunt, she found it difficult to sort out the people she saw crowding through the carnival. Men and women alike, they wore trousers, cotton shirts, and shapeless cloth shoes. And leather jackets, and hair that was short and spiky or long and in curls. She became confused and annoyed. True, some of the people she saw were identifiable as men, and some of the men she saw were young, but they walked like apes and had a strange chemical smell about them and were not attractive to her.
“Hey there, kitten! Guess your age, your weight, your birthdate?”
The cat flinched into a crouch. Though the words of this New World language meant nothing to her, she could usually comprehend the thoughts that underlay words, and for a moment she had unreasonably felt as if the guess-man’s pitch had been directed at her. Narrow-eyed and coiled to run, she stared up at him.
“Yes, Mother! Congratulations.” He was facing a pudding-cheeked woman with a pregnant belly. “What would you like me to guess? Name? Age? Date of your wedding day? Yes? Okay. Fifty cents, please. If I don’t get it right, one of my fine china dolls is yours.”
He was not talking to the cat after all. Why would he? she scolded herself. He offered his invitation to the dozens of people walking by. And many of them stopped for him, perhaps because there was a wry poetry in his voice, or perhaps because he was young and not ugly. Slim, dressed in denims and boots, he stood tall though he was in fact not very tall. In front of the booth that marked his place on the midway he took a stance like a bard in a courtyard. Something about him made her want to see his eyes, but because he wore dark glasses she could not. His face was quiet, unexceptional, yet he seemed like one who had something more to him than muscle and manhead.
Not that she needed anything more. It was enough that he was young and not ugly. He would suffice.
She trotted on, looking for a private place to make the change. It would take only a minute.
Within a few strides the familiar musky scent of lust touched her whiskers. Her delicate lip drew back from her tiny pointed teeth, and she slipped under a tent flap. She had reached the locat
ion of “Hinkleman’s G-String Goddess Revue.”
This will do.
Inside, all was heat, mosquitoes, dim light, and the smell of sweating men. Forty of them were crowded in there, watching a stripper at work on the small stage. The golden visitor leapt to a chair back and watched also. No one noticed her. She sat with her long tail curled around her slender haunches, and its softly furred tip twitched with scorn for what she was seeing.
Stupid, simple-minded cow. She uses her body like a club. She does not know how to walk, how to move, how to tease. Her breasts are huge, like melons, and that is all she knows.
The thoughts of everyone in the tent swarmed in its air thicker than the mosquitoes. Therefore the cat quickly knew that the stripper, called a kootch girl, was expected to more than mildly arouse the men, called marks. She knew that the kootch girl’s repertory was limited by her meager talents, that the girl was planning to get out of her G-string in order to achieve maximum effect. She knew that several of the marks were thinking in terms of audience participation. She knew that in back of the tent was a trailer where those with fifty dollars might buy some private action later.
The men roared. The stripper was flashing her pudenda. Jumping down from her perch, the cat darted backstage, hot with scorn and anger.
Is that what they call a woman these days? Can no one show them how it should be done?
Backstage were two more strippers, spraying one another’s semi-naked bodies with mosquito repellent. Mr. Hinkleman, the owner, was back there also, lounging in a tilted chair, bored, drinking gin between hot hoarse stints in the bally box. Off to one side was a booth with a flimsy curtain, a changing facility, not much used by women who were about to take off their clothes in front of an audience anyway. The golden cat walked into it. A moment later, a golden woman walked out.
“Carrumba!” Mr. Hinkleman, who had seen a lot over a career spanning twenty-three years in the carnival, nevertheless let his chair legs slam to the floor, jolting himself bolt upright. “Hoo! Where did you come from, honey?”