The Feline Wizard

by Christopher Stasheff

  “What a handsome people they are!” Balkis exclaimed.

  “They are indeed,” Anthony agreed. “I see no one fat and no one skinny, and all have that lovely bronze-toned skin.” He smiled. “How wonderful it must be to live in a land where you never need wear more than a loincloth! Though I must admit theirs are wrapped to cover the sides.”

  “The women's sarongs are beautiful in their jewel tones,” Balkis said, “and how exquisitely they are patterned! Indeed, their weavers must love their craft.”

  “Love it, yes,” Anthony marveled. “One more art among many. Does no one here actually work?”

  One of the musicians heard; he looked up with curiosity, and all the others, seeing him, followed his gaze. Then they put down their instruments and rose as the first advanced, holding up an open palm in greeting and dazzling them with a broad smile. As he came close, Anthony and Balkis had to hide their expressions of surprise. Apparently they weren't successful, for the villager smiled and said, “Yes, you thought we were as tall as you, only farther away, did you not?”

  “Of course,” Balkis stammered, “for you are of the same proportions as we.”

  “Certainly! How could you know that we only came up to your waists?” the villager asked. “Welcome to Pytan, O Strangers. I am Rokin.”

  “I am Balkis, and he is Anthony,” Balkis said, imitating the stranger's sign of greeting.

  “We hope you have news of the great world outside our valley,” Rokin said. “We will trade you songs for tales.”

  “We know something of what moves outside,” Balkis said, smiling, “though we have traveled too fast for any news to catch up with us.”

  “At the least,” Anthony put in, “we can tell you of the marvels that lie to the south, if you can tell us what you know of the obstacles ahead of us to the north.”

  “Do you travel to the north, then?” Rokin asked.

  “We do, and my home is in the southern mountains.”

  “Then you are of the breed that Alexander's soldiers sired when they sought to conquer the hills!” Rokin shook his head in amazement. “It must be uncanny to live on land that slopes.”

  Anthony grinned. “It seems strange to me to see people dwell and farm on land that is level … well, it did seem strange when I started out.”

  “You have heard all we have to tell, then,” Balkis said with disappointment.

  “Surely not, for even in this little valley we hear the echoes of great battles and arrogant horsemen who sweep across broad plains, seeking to rule the world!”

  Several of the Pytanians shuddered at the thought, but one said, “It must be amazing to be able to stand in one place and see completely to the horizon.”

  “I thought so, too,” Anthony admitted, “the first time I came down to the desert to sell food to the caravans.”

  “Caravans!” cried several, their eyes lighting with wonder, and the young man said, “Strings of camels that sway on their way, eastward to China, westward to Samarkand and Persia, northward to Maracanda! Fabled cities and lands of wonder! We know only those that travel northward, and we must wander a day's march to meet them, so we see them rarely! Oh, tell us of them!”

  “I can tell you little,” Balkis said with a laugh, “though I can speak of Bordestang and the forests of Allustria, even some little about the Arabian galleys and the people of India.”

  “Tell us, tell us!” the Pytanians chorused, and led them to the village green, where they sat around an empty firepit to listen eagerly.

  Anthony looked around, disconcerted.

  “You are looking for food and drink, are you not?” Rokin said, somewhat chagrined. “Panyat, I pray you bring a dozen of the finest apples.”

  The young man who had marveled at the thought of plains ducked into one of the straw-roofed stucco cottages.

  “We do not eat or drink, as you do,” one of the women said apologetically. “The scent of our apples is sustenance enough for us.”

  Indeed, every one of the villagers was bringing out an apple from a cleverly concealed pocket and waving it under his or her nose. Panyat reappeared with a bowl of beautiful rosy fruit in the crook of his arm, so perfect that Balkis noticed that the apples the villagers held had each the marks of insects or the lopsided shape that comes from growing too closely. In his other hand he carried a pottery beaker of clear water which he set down at their feet. “We always keep water near for washing,” he explained, “for we love to be clean. I hope this will suffice as drink.”

  Balkis lifted her beaker and sipped. “Oh, how delicious! It is delightfully cool.”

  Anthony rolled a sip over his tongue as though he were tasting the Piconyans' wine and nodded. “Cool indeed, and with a wonderful tang to it.”

  “Has it really?” Panyat asked, intrigued. “To us it is merely water, for we do not taste of it.”

  “At least you will never be drunk,” Balkis said with a laugh.

  “Drunk?” Rokin asked, and the crowd murmured echoes of the word, puzzled.

  “The dizziness that comes from drinking too much wine,” Balkis explained, “such as your neighbors to the south make by pressing the juice from grapes and letting it ferment.”

  “What is'ferment'?”

  That took a bit more explaining and led to a discussion of the green grapes of Allustria and their wine-making, which led to the tale of Balkis' travels from Europe to Maracanda.

  Anthony listened, as rapt as any of the Pytanians, and when they scoffed in disbelief at her tales of genies and evil sorcerers, Anthony staunchly assured them that if Balkis said it, it must be true. He did not say, though, that she had gone through half her travels as a cat, though she could see in his gaze that he suspected it. After all, he had never heard any of this, either.

  When the Pytanians had left them alone in a guest cottage, Anthony asked her, “Did you really travel with the Lord Wizard of Merovence?”

  “I did, and you need not look so impressed,” Balkis said with a smile, “for I am sure you have scarcely heard of Merovence.”

  “Well, then, glad I am to have heard of it now! What is he like, this Lord Wizard?”

  “A gentleman who is modest to a fault, completely faithful to his wife, devoted to her and to his children, and exceedingly patient with a skeptical, mocking maiden,” Balkis told him.

  Anthony frowned. “You make him sound like any good householder!”

  “He is that.”

  “But does he not have a towering presence and a countenance of ivory? An imposing mien? An aura of mystery and magic?”

  “He is on the tall side,” Balkis admitted, “but as to the rest of it, he looks quite ordinary, even handsome for a man of his age. As to his aura of magic, though, he does his best to hide it and appear like any other man.”

  “Why?” Anthony said, flabbergasted. “Would he not want men to know his greatness?”

  “I do not think he believes in it himself,” Balkis confessed. “Besides, by appearing to be as ordinary as the people around him, he hears a great deal more than he would if they stared at him in awe.”

  That made sense to Anthony, she could see, but he was still puzzling over a mighty wizard trying to look ordinary as he fell asleep.

  Balkis fell asleep thinking of Matt, too, and marveled that she thought of him only as another man. Her childish infatuation with him seemed to have disappeared. She wondered why, and decided that perhaps she was growing up.

  The next morning, when they had breakfasted on more apples and thanked their hosts for a night's lodging, Balkis asked them, “Do you know where we might find a guide for hire?”

  “A guide?” Rokin asked.

  “Someone who knows the country between here and Maracanda,” Balkis explained, “who can warn us of the pitfalls that lie ahead and lead us around the worst of them.”

  “Why, that I can do!” Panyat said, stepping forward, eyes shining. “At least as far as the border of Prester John's land.” He turned to Rokin. “May I accompany them
, hetman?”

  “You have already had your year of wandering, Panyat,” Rokin said with a frown.

  “Yes, but not my fill of travel! Indeed, it is only because I have wandered toward the north that I could be of any use to these strangers.”

  Balkis' hopes rose. “We shall pay him a golden coin.”

  “Gold means little to us here,” Rokin said, frowning.

  “But it means much to the caravan traders who bring the luxuries we cannot make,” Panyat pointed out, “and I shall return knowing where to find them. You were saying only yesterday that it would be good to have more northern ivory with which to fashion statues of the goddess.”

  “We have always traded apples, and our weavings,” Rokin told him.

  “But it would take so many tapestries to buy one small ivory tusk! I shall bring back the gold coin for the village, Rokin, not for myself.”

  An older woman stepped forth from the crowd, resting a hand on Panyat's shoulder. “There is no reason why he should not go, Rokin.”

  “The wide world is dangerous, Mishara,” Rokin reminded her. “Your son might not come back to you.”

  “His chances are far better with these good people to ward him, especially since they are wizards, and therefore better able to protect themselves and him!”

  “Aye, let him go,” said an older man, stepping up to take Mishara's hand. “We must risk him in order to keep him, for if we do not, he will someday leave us.”

  “None of us can leave our apples for long, for we would die without their scent, Haramis.” But Rokin was weakening.

  “The traders assure us that there are apple trees in other lands,” Haramis returned. “That is why they insist on so many for one little tusk.”

  “True enough, though I suspect ours have a far sweeter taste than any others they have eaten.” Rokin sighed. “Very well, let him go—but see he is well supplied.”

  They left soon after, Panyat leading the way out of the valley of apples. He wore a wide sash around his waist, a sash that bulged all along the front.

  Balkis counted the bulges and said, “Only three apples? Can that be enough to take you to the borders of Prester John's kingdom and back?”

  “Easily, friend Balkis.” Panyat looked back with a smile. “I need only their scent, after all.”

  The ant couldn't understand why it was taking so long to reach his stolen property. It knew those confounded humans were carrying the gold nugget, but why was it taking so long to catch up with them? Surely its encounters with all the things that tried to eat it hadn't delayed it all that long—had they? Though of course, once it had defeated them, eating had taken much longer than if it had been traveling with a score of its fellow workers. It didn't realize how much more slowly it had been traveling with an overfull stomach, but it couldn't resist eating as long as there was food.

  Now, though, it was hungry again, and had come across a trail of honey that it followed avidly, licking the sweetness from the rocks on which it had been spread. It didn't fear the bees that had made the amber delicacy, for it knew they were small inconsequential things that would only try to strike it with their tails—as though that could do any good!

  Then it rounded a rock, and saw the honey's source.

  The trail of honey came not from a hive, but from the mouth of a man lying on his belly, chin propped on his fists and mouth open with his tongue out—and that tongue was three feet long and fragrant with the sweet aroma!

  Well, food was food. The ant started toward the man. Obviously he had set his mouth as a trap for ants. Well, he had caught one.

  The man looked just as surprised as the ant felt, but he grinned with hunger and his tongue leaped into the air, swinging sideways at the ant. It glittered as it came.

  The ant danced aside and the tongue smacked the ground, then rose again with a dozen pebbles sticking to it. The ant realized it would have stuck just as firmly to itself, possibly even with its legs in the air, helpless, waiting to be dashed against a rock. But it dodged the tongue again and, before it could swing a third time, dashed in to counterattack. Startled, the anteater man rolled up on his side, swinging a fist—but the insect leaped onto the arm and scuttled up to the shoulder, remembering how it had dealt with the uniped. All these humans were built alike, after all, and the neck was always on top of the shoulders.

  Under the circumstances, perhaps it was justifiable that the ant ate the anteater.

  As they walked northward the land grew daily more arid; grass gave way to rock, and trees to low thornbushes, though there was still the occasional small, tortured pine tree—usually dead and dry. Finally, when they had been traveling a week, they topped a rise and saw, stretching away before them, a rolling beige wasteland where nothing grew and nothing moved, except dust-devils and blowing tendrils of sand.

  Balkis stared. “How beautiful—and how terrible! What is this place, Panyat?”

  “It is called the Sea of Sand, Balkis—and it is a sea indeed, though one without water.”

  “A dry sea?” asked Anthony, who had never seen a body of water larger than a pond. “How can that be?”

  “It seems still now,” Panyat said, “but look at it again tomorrow from this same place and you will see a completely different picture. Each dune will have moved a dozen feet or so; some will have changed their shapes, and others will have disappeared completely. The sand is always moving, though far slower than water. It swells into waves like the sea and is never still, always slipping, remounding, and being blown about like salt spray—or as the traders tell me seawater is blown.” He smiled sheepishly.

  “It is beautiful.” Anthony stared, dazed. “But it is terrible, too. So vast, and without moisture! How are we to cross it? Even our feet will sink in with every step!”

  “That much we can cure with the aid of yonder tree.” Panyat pointed to one of the dead pines. “We must cut wood, split it into planks, and tie them to our feet.”

  “Of course!” Anthony cried. “If it is like the water of a sea, it is even more like snow! We must make sand skis!”

  “If that is your name for them, of course.” But Panyat frowned. “What is 'snow'?”

  Anthony and Balkis took turns explaining about the magical white powder that fell from the sky, mounded up into drifts, and pressed itself into ice by its own weight. Then they had to explain what ice was, and finished by telling Panyat that when spring came, the ice turned to water.

  “Truly your mountains are lands of wonder!” the Pytanian responded.

  Anthony laughed. “Your valley of apple trees seems just as magical to me, friend Panyat, as do your people. How wonderful would it be to survive on the aroma of our food alone in the dead of winter!”

  When they had fashioned their skis, Anthony and Balkis made a meal of hardtack and dried pork, with Pytanian apples for dessert—they had each packed a considerably greater number than Panyat brought. He managed quite well by sniffing one of his own.

  “It is amazing how long our stores have lasted,” Anthony said.

  Balkis nodded. “We have been lucky to find game, and nuts and berries, so often.”

  “And the hospitality of those we have met,” Anthony agreed. “Still, long though they have lasted, our supplies are very low.”

  Balkis shrugged. “Scarcely surprising, since we have been on the road two months now. They should last until we have crossed this desert, though.”

  They slept through the rest of the day in the shade of a boulder, then set out across the sand-sea at night. Very quickly, Anthony and Balkis lost their bearings. Balkis halted and asked, “How are we to know the way? Every dune looks like every other, when we are down here among them!”

  Panyat pointed at the sky. “In the desert, you can always see the stars—and though they move through the night, they turn like a wheel, and its hub is one star that moves very little. It lies in the north; therefore, as long as we keep it before us, we march toward the land of Prester John.”

  “So that i
s what the caravan drivers mean when they say they follow the North Star!” Anthony exclaimed.

  “You have seen it before?” Panyat asked.

  Anthony nodded. “There is little else to see, in a mountain winter—but the cold makes the sky clear and the stars bright. We can tell the hour by their positions.”

  Panyat grinned. “Then there is little chance of your becoming lost, so long as you remember where to find the center of your clock.”

  They shuffled on through the night, and the sand-skiing was hard enough work that there was little breath to spare for conversation. They halted to rest at midnight, though, and Balkis asked, “Where shall we spend the day?”

  “At an oasis I know,” Panyat told them. “During my wander-year, I traveled with the traders all the way across this desert. They knew how to follow a line of oases so that they never had to go more than three nights without fresh water.”

  “That,” said Anthony, “has the sound of an underground river that comes to the surface now and again.”

  “Perhaps it is,” Panyat replied, “but legend says the first caravan master told a djinni where to seek the most lovely djinniyah in the world, and in return the djinni dug him a string of wells from here to the northern edge of the desert. The oases sprang from those wells.”

  “As well the one explanation as the other.” Balkis rose, dusting her hands and taking up her curving pine ski-poles. “But dawn will come and find us nowhere near your oasis, Panyat. Let us walk.”

  They shuffled rather than walking, but made surprisingly good time for so slow a mode of travel, reaching the first oasis when the east had begun to brighten with dawn. There, they washed their faces and hands, refilled their waterskins, and made a breakfast of hardtack and jerky. Panyat watched with amusement, sniffing his apple. They took turns telling stories as they ate, and Balkis was fascinated to discover how easily and naturally Anthony's speech fell into meter and rhyme. They fell asleep in the shadow of palm trees before the sun rose, and slept through the day.