by Gayle Greeno
The Tale wound on and on, rising and falling in the rich inflections, the power of Mr’rhah’s mindvoice. Khar listened intently to the old, beloved Tale, the words buoying her spirits.
“...And some erected shelters, while others sought for food, and still others pounded and thumped at the strange sleek silver forms that had brought them, plunging down like a plummeting osprey striking the surface of the lake for a fish. Some trekked all across the land carrying heavy burdens. We stalked these walkers, sampled their thoughts, and wished for understanding that not even our Elders could provide. We hid and watched, eyes glowing bright and inquisitive from behind rocky crags; we stretched long and still on branches over their heads, our eyes reflecting green and gold with leaf-light, and slipped silent and supple as dawn mist from place to place to follow them. Every so often we encouraged one of them to see us, and they invariably responded by making strange little lip-smacking noises, finger-snappings, and word-soundings of ‘Here, kitty, kitty.’ We were touched that they had already named us, though it was not our own name.
“And as they wandered over the land, they bored holes into the earth, sank small bundles into those holes, and lovingly packed dirt over them. They talked at their wrists, and listened, too, and we wondered why—if they could listen to their wrists—they could not hear us. We yearned to know what they were burying, and claw-carefully pried loose a few of the shell-like cylinders to see, but we could not make heads nor tails of them. They did not smell of food, though at first we suspected they cached these things as the squirrels bury nuts and the woodmice store seeds against winter.”
Khar trembled with anticipation. This was the part of the tale that set the hairs along her spine atingle, that never failed to inject a tiny frisson of fear. She formed the human word and concept in her mind, reveling in the sheer sound of it: Plumb—Periodic Linear Ultra-Mensuration Beamer. Neither falanese, the ghatti common tongue, nor their original mindspeech contained a comparable word for the object or the idea.
Indeed, her early ghatti ancestors had no conception of anything that could explode like that; that was one of the things the human visitors inadvertently had taught not only the ghatti but themselves as well. They had brought with them an unintentional devastation that nothing native to Methuen could envision. Khar knew the history of Doyce’s people as well as her own: how the patient survey teams had set the bores in place, drilling some by hand to avoid disturbing delicate geological layerings, inserting the ultrasensitive probes to listen, see, and feel the land around them, to touch and taste the earth and to report back to the monitors, the glowing green screens, and the men and women who collated and interpreted the raw data flowing in from hundreds of isolated sites.
The Plumbs could report on any sort of danger, from sudden, random earth shifts to the mass gatherings of potentially dangerous indigenous life-forms, though the Erakwa shrank from the offworlders as though their very touch defiled the earth. But most important of all to the Newcomers, the Plumbs assayed what the earth held close to her bosom, her jewels and treasures: raw ores, precious metals, gems. and the less valuable but still highly coveted geological formations of marble, slate, limestone, granite, and more. The veritable building blocks of a people with the yearning to literally carve themselves a place in history, people with a severe lack of natural resources on their home planet. Hence the Newcomers’ expedition to Methuen. But then the Plumbs began to explode....
The ghatten would learn the delicate interlinking of the tales as they grew older, the interweaving of ghatti and human history, and would begin to understand the story as a whole. For now the tales gave the younglings the first taste of the answers, the truths that helped assuage ghatti curiosity. And for Khar, the complete comprehension of the intricacies of a Major Tale would mean she had risen a turn higher on the spiral toward Elderdom. Ah, if only she could succeed.... Khar listened again with her whole concentration, putting her own thoughts aside.
“... We despaired for these Newcomers, for with each fresh turmoil of the earth they became less and less a society. After three of the six original silver ospreys suddenly sprang into the air, the Newcomers who remained seemed to lose all hope, fledglings crying piteously, abandoned in their nest. Their fear left a bitter metallic bite to the air that we could smell and taste. They became fainthearted, looked shabby as if they had not groomed themselves or each other properly in a long time. And they turned on each other in their fear, fighting for food, for shelter, killing each other as a rabid animal runs wild, biting and snapping at anything within reach.
“We wanted so badly to aid them, to share our thoughts, but still we could not, our season had not yet come, and their minds were unripe. We watched their society crumbling and feared that these creatures would destroy themselves before we could make contact. Some counseled we should desist, that the fightings and killings proved they were not worthy of sharing our thoughts, but others countered that we must show them the truth, make them see the errors of their ways. But how? They would not, could not listen.”
Yes, how? Khar asked herself. How could she show Doyce the truth if she wouldn’t completely share with Khar? Shamed, Khar concentrated anew as Mr’rhah lifted her listeners to the Tale’s climax, her mindvoice soaring as she sang of the Bonding of a Newcomer’s youngling with a tiny female ghatten and the sudden onrush of shared mindspeech, comprehension, communion at last. The story of Matthias Vandersma and the ghatten Kharm was worthy of a Tale of its own, and, indeed, formed the next Major Tale on the spiral.
With a calculated pause, Mr’rhah leaned to sniff one of the younglings, her old, leathery nose with its v-notched scar touching against the fresh, unmarred gray of the ghatten’s. She lifted her head, then held it poised in an attitude of listening; Khar strove to hear as well, a foreboding anticipation coursing through her.
“And so, my loves, it happened one day that....” Mr‘rhah hesitated as if she’d lost her place, shook her head. An impossibility; no Elder ever dropped the thread of a Tale; they could recite it endless times, commence and stop anywhere, wind it backward and forward without losing a word, truth flowing as steadily alive as heart-throbs. “...It happened one....” Her head began an involuntary palsied swaying and shaking and then her whole body snapped rigid in a silent mindscream. Her body stretched and stretched, a tensile elongation as her grizzled muzzle pointed toward the ceiling, her mouth gaping, lips peeled back in pain to reveal the worn teeth. Khar could feel the pain, knew that each and every ghatt and ghatta in the room and any others mindlinked with the Tale could feel it as well. But they were all locked in it with Mr’rhah, feeling the pain bore through them, mindspeech fraying as surely as an old hempen rope frays and snaps.
“Break them free, snap the younglings out of the mindsharing,” Mr‘rhah screamed, rolling on the flagstones, head arched backward, flecks of foam whitening her muzzle. “Mem’now, break them free now! I haven’t the strength! Break them free or we’ll lose them, and they’ll mindwalk alone forever!”
Mem‘now’s broad yellow head jerked back and forth as Mr’rhah’s scream buffeted him. At last he reacted, a stinging slap at the ghatten nearest him, raking across the sensitive little charcoal gray nose with his claws until the ghatten howled, then looked at him clear-eyed, questioning him in frightened falanese. Others reacted as well, tearing the two other younglings out of the mindlink with cuffs and blows, and that was the last Khar recalled of the scene, for her fears and Mr’rhah’s pain shivered in tandem as the links snapped one by one, the joining destroyed, sundered, leaving each participating ghatt and ghatta to pull themselves back toward sanity as best they could.
Mad fear clawing at her, Khar exploded, leaping over Doyce’s sleeping form and landing near the dwindling campfire. The next mindscream came fainter but equally potent. “Saam!” The ghatta wailed. “Saam, what is it, what?” The mindlink snapped and crumbled even further, broke into a thousand fragmenting cries as the Elder One severed her last linkage, withdrew to escape, whe
eling free to elude the terror she could not control. Khar tumbled back on her haunches at the suddenness of the final release. No reason, no reason at all, she argued with herself, to believe the horror involved Saam, but in her heart of hearts she sensed it did. Proof! Where was the truth? With so many snapping out of the link in disorder, truth was not lost but immured so deeply in subconscious memory that it was practically impossible to resurrect.
She spun a frail thread of mindspeech through the night, felt it wither and recede at the lack of contact. Alone, ah, so alone! She screamed again, this time aloud, and a part of her saw Doyce come thrashing out of her bedroll, sword scraping from her scabbard as she stumbled erect, a slight figure in small clothes with a lethal weapon in her hand. The woman spun in a terse, controlled circle, one bare heel planted for stability, sword flickering from half-extension to guard as she patrolled, searching for danger. After a few moments, she risked bending and tossing branches into the fire, the flames flickering, then crackling, soaring high. Doyce continued checking outward, searching the aspened copse behind her and watching the clear stretch of meadow with a cautious, assessing gaze.
Khar screamed again and yet again, could not help herself, her eyes widening in the sudden spurt of flame, yet seeing nothing, envisioning something beyond the normally acute ghatti-sight. Each hair of her silky coat stood erect, and she could not control the sound issuing from her throat, mourning the dark and danger of the unknown and unknowable. She heard her own voice rise and fall—challenge, plaint, yearning, fury—and at last strain to reach a crescendo and die. But no one heard; there was no one to hear. Nothing, nothing she could do; it was done.
Dully, not caring, she watched Doyce ease her way alongside the little mare, trying to snag Lokka’s halter as the horse’s hooves churned the soft earth, sending up the smell of bruised, torn grass, her eyes rolled to whites as she strained against the lead-line, ready to bolt as soon as the leather parted. Escape, to run as far away as she could, Khar desired it as well, to escape the nightmare sounds that had flooded her brain. But she could not escape, would not go; she had Bonded, she had Chosen.
Now Doyce knelt beside her, stroking the prickling hair along her spine, trying to ’speak her, babbling senseless sounds at her, words she couldn’t bear to listen to or answer. Doyce sighed, rose to her feet and surveyed the woods and slope around her again. “Khar?” she asked tentatively, not wishing to intrude.
Khar’s response was brusque and to the point. “You are safe. I will watch.”
And so they both sat until morning, Doyce half-dressed, body quivering with waves of cold and tension, her sword bared to greet the unknown, Khar a short distance away, beyond reach, back turned to her beloved Bondmate. Neither spoke.
“Com-ing!”
The only indication that the shout had penetrated was that horse and rider both leaned their weight to the right, in the direction of the sound, but made no other move. From their position atop the small rise they contemplated a sparkling blue pond fringed with reeds that formed a gold-brown and deep green frieze interwoven at one point with the figure of a bittern, its elongated shape synchronous with the vertical pattern. The rest of nature appeared unalarmed and unaware of the shout; a bronze-speckled starling tilted its head from side to side searching for seeds and bugs among the meadow grass, and a black squirrel sat upright and scrubbed at its face with busy paws, briefly curious about horse and rider, then it began to scamper about its business. Indeed, no one but the horse and rider had heard the shout.
The hemlock growth to the right of the two exploded with motion and a large cat hurtled across the rise, launching itself squarely at the target the woman and the trim little sorrel mare presented. The cat, bull’s-eye striped in gray-brown and black, sprang upward, hind legs bunching as the muscles contracted, and leaped on the saddle platform in front of the woman. It made a half-turn, wrapped its tail around white feet and sat facing forward, gazing out over the horse’s head. A gold hoop glinted in its left ear near the base, and a gold ball dotted the tip of its right ear. The cat was nearly as big as a three-year-old child.
“Well?” Doyce asked, scratching the ghatta between her ears. “Anything, nothing, something?” The ghatta craned its neck as if loosening tense muscles but refused to look back at the woman. It took immense interest in a nonexistent speck of dust on one white forepaw and began to lick assiduously. “Well?” Doyce repeated.
“Nothing,” the ghatta allowed and licked some more. “Nothing that you could see or hear or taste or feel. But something ... I don’t know what ... so very faint, like the barest remnant of a nightmare. I can feel it, but I can’t form it.”
The mare whickered consolingly, for she, too, understood the words mind-directed as they were so that only the three were privy to the conversation. The small creatures of the meadow, frozen or frantic from the ghatta’s sudden rush, began at last to resume their normal activities in the absence of further sound or movement, but they continued to keep a wary eye on the large feline.
“Maybe you’re being too sensitive, still too keyed up after last night,” Doyce consoled as her fingers continued their patter behind the ghatta’s ears. Khar’pern shook her head in disgust and Doyce stopped. It was going to take more to pacify the ghatta than she’d anticipated. The eldritch scream last night had spooked Khar, no two ways about it. And understandably so—the merest hint of it had coiled through her sleep, tightening a noose around her own less-than-restful dreams.
And that was all she could make of it, for this morning Khar still refused to discuss the night’s alarum. She mindspoke, but whenever Doyce questioned her, the ghatta broke the mindlink. Her slanted amber eyes welled with deep loss and disillusionment, the look of a child discovering that all the seeming verities of love and trust, home and safety were false, seductive dancing shadows cloaking the final misstep into the dreary pit of nothingness. If it hadn’t been for that, and for the fact that Lokka had strained her lead nearly to the breaking, Doyce would have accounted it a terror of the night, formless but frightening, that sometimes overtook weary travelers. That, and the knowledge that the back of her own neck still prickled.
Doyce sighed and gave the ghatta a final gentle pat. For a moment Khar pressed back against the comforting touch, then she sat up straight, claws extended to grip the shearling on the pommel platform. “If we ride straight through, we can make Myllard’s Ale House tonight. We can take the cut above Tavistock. It’s a harder climb but quicker, and I didn’t promise anyone that we’d stop at Tavistock, only that we might.” Somehow she wanted to be back at the capital tonight, and she sensed the ghatta would prefer it, too. And there was always the chance that Oriel would have the same idea, that he and Saam would have pushed to finish the final days of their circuit and ridden straight back as well. If anyone knew her mind, he did, and that bothered her because she could never see into his the same way. Instead, all she saw were reflections of her own doubts as to how durable their relationship would prove to be. “Ask Lokka if she minds the climb?” she asked with her mind.
“Fine ... with us both.” Doyce shook out the reins, and the little sorrel mare turned away from the downslope and trotted toward the rolling foothills that led to the Hightmont, where the trail would wind up and around its high, sheltering flank and finally down to Gaernett, the capital. She looked longingly over her shoulder at the pond and wiped her sweaty face with a forearm, shoving red-brown curls off her forehead. Individual silver strands almost lost in the red highlights glinted in the sunlight.
Lady take the shearling tabard when it was hot! A quick swim would have been nice. The ghatta half-turned and the faintest, fleetingest of grins appeared. “Leeches,” she murmured. “And hungry.” Leave it to a ghatta to take the pleasure out of a daydream by providing the truth!
The trail snaking through the low ridges at the Hightmont’s base showed minimal upkeep, and Doyce clucked in disapproval as she kept a firm seat while Lokka picked her way around potholes and rough wash
outs, rocks and rubble that had cut loose and sluiced downslope onto the trail after the summer storms. Brush untrimmed since spring cleanup reached out toward her, spears of leathery-tough, sharp-bladed leaves and wiry branches exuding a rich, spicy scent in the full heat of the sun. Still too low for a finger of breeze to ease down her collar, but she could hear it rustling and beckoning not far above. She’d have to report the condition of the pass-through when she got back. Doyce made a face at the thought: bureaucracy, another report to fill out and file with someone.
The sudden, sharp noise of a rock ricocheting and tumbling downslope, sand and loose earth slithering after it, jarred her out of her daydreams.
“Plumb!” she shouted and bent low over the mare, jamming her heels into Lokka’s sides and urging her toward a jutting overhang about one hundred meters ahead. Shaken and sweaty, she pulled up and looked back along the path, trembling as the final cascade and the random pattering of loose stones and freshly fractured earth hit and bounced along the trail just about where she’d been caught woolgathering.
Chagrined, she looked down at the ghatta, unperturbed by their unexpected dash, her only reaction having been to dig her claws deeper into her shearling pad. “Avalanche,” Doyce emended. “Just a small one, not a Plumb. Sorry.”